January 17, 2018

Manhood and Alpha Males

Manhood is not natural, but it is essential. No society can endure if it does not harness male sexual energy and teach men to take care of the children they father and the women who bear them.

As George Gilder explains pointedly in Men and Marriage, "Unlike a woman, a man has no civilized role or agenda inscribed in his body." The boy has no onboard GPS directing him toward his future. His transition into manhood can only come into being with significant, intentional work by other men. As a behavior, manhood must be learned, proven, and earned. As an identity, manhood must be bestowed by a boy's father and the community's larger fraternity of men. His mother can only affirm it. She cannot bequeath it....

Maleness just happens, but manhood does not. The first is a biological event, while the second is a developed character quality. When manhood is not formed and cultivated, males fail to mature, resulting in the "perpetual adolescence" or "failure to launch" that plagues our culture....

The human male nature doesn't naturally go in the direction civilization requires; it requires the direction of other men. Unlike the female nature, which tends to exist reliably among the median scale of human behavior, the male nature is oriented more toward extremes, for good or bad.....

Manhood must be crafted and refined in order to orient males in pro-social, communitarian directions. In fact, this is the first work of every civilization.....Ghettos are not created by city planners, crime by the police, or failing health by big pharma. Each of these social ills arises by inattention to the sexual behaviors of males. If he doesn't have to marry before having sex (and potentially fathering children), the average man won't. So he hasn't. The feminization of poverty and the accompanying declines in female happiness and childhood well-being are the tragic results....

In Manhood in the Making, anthropologist David Gilmore provides an essential insight:

One of my findings here is that manhood ideologies always include a criterion of selfless generosity, even to the point of sacrifice. Again and again, we find that "real" men are those who give more than they take away; they serve others. Real men are generous, even to a fault. Non-men are often those stigmatized as stingy and unproductive.

A good man is the fountain, not the drain. The formation of such men is the first task of human civilization, and its largest threat when ignored.

In both my personal and professional life, I’m a woman who spends most of her time in the company of alpha males...who embody the traditional traits of Alpha Male dominance: strength, competitiveness, courage, assertiveness, decisiveness, intelligence, aggression…I could go on ad infinitum. These qualities don’t faze me in the slightest. Quite the contrary: I love and absolutely embrace these qualities, both in males and in myself.

As much as he may excel as an athlete or on the battlefield, a true Alpha Male also develops the capacities of character to temper, channel, moderate, and strategically employ this strength. Character – and what is traditionally referred to as “honor” – is central to the way that these men live their lives....

The success and survival of the human race is due as much to woman’s reproductive power as it is due to man’s power to protect and provide. Balance is found by establishing mutual respect; not by diminishing one side or the other.

September 13, 2017

The cognitive differences between men and women

From Stanford Medicine Two minds, The cognitive differences between men and women

Over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.....Not how well they work

There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable......

Women excel in several measures of verbal ability — pretty much all of them, except for verbal analogies. Women’s reading comprehension and writing ability consistently exceed that of men, on average. They out­perform men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed. They’re more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory.

Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills: They’re better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two- or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, at correctly determining angles from the horizontal, at tracking moving objects and at aiming projectiles.

Navigation studies in both humans and rats show that females of both species tend to rely on landmarks, while males more typically rely on “dead reckoning”: calculating one’s position by estimating the direction and distance traveled rather than using landmarks. Many of these cognitive differences appear quite early in life.

Why our brains differ

1. The sex-steroid hormones. In female mammals, ...estrogens, along with ... progesterone; and in males, testosterone and ...androgens. Importantly, males developing normally in utero get hit with a big mid-gestation surge of testosterone...
2. The sex chromosomes, which form one of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes in each cell. Generally, females have two X chromosomes in their pair, while males have one X and one Y chromosome. Every cell in a man’s body (including his brain) has a slightly different set of functioning ​sex-​chromosome genes from those operating in a woman’s.

"Australia is about to become an atheist nation. ...Our trek to radical unbelief follows much of western Europe. The same trends are evident in the US. Though religious belief is stronger there, it has lost the elites and over time elite opinion leads public opinion. The eclipse of Christianity will be like the eclipse of the sun. Darkness will be the result. Will it be a temporary darkness or a long night of the Western soul?

In abandoning God, we are about to embark on one of the most radical social experiments in Western history. It is nothing short of the reordering of human nature. Short of war, nothing is as consequential....

The unfolding revelation of the character of God, and the developing conception of the character of humanity, as the Old Testament progresses, is one of the central ­elements of cultural and indeed political development in Western civilization. But it was in the New Testament that the bases for human rights and human dignity were most explicitly developed....

"The soul — the embodiment of our deepest sense of integrity and destiny — gave way to the self as the therapeutic age replaced the age of belief. Now, in our postmodern times, even self has been supplanted by brand. Soul to self to brand is a steep decline in what it means to be a human being....

"I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?

"I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men. You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologizing for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives."

Lessing said the teacher tried to "catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish"... "This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing. It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticize because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests...Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

Except I didn't buy 1,000 dollars worth of Bitcoin in 2008. If I had, I'd have more than $40,000,000 today. It's not that I didn't know. It's that I didn't act. Two different things.I knew, but I didn't know for sure. Not enough to act.
All the good stuff happens when we act even if we don't know for sure.

August 24, 2017

The Etymology of 'man' and some words for woman

The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mannaz or *manwaz "man, person") and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age....The word developed into Old English man, mann meaning primarily "adult male human" but secondarily capable of designating a person of unspecified gender, "someone, one" or humanity at large...

However, man in traditional usage (without an article) refers to the species, to humanity, or "mankind", as a whole. The usage persists in all registers of English although it has an old-fashioned tone. Equating the term for the male with the whole species is common in many languages, for example in French (l'Homme). On the other hand, some languages have a general word for 'human individual' which can apply to people of either gender. German has the general word Mensch, but Mann for (adult) male person. Latin has the general word homo and for males the word vir. The Latin word for woman is femina......The Latin root word 'man' means “hand" from which we get manual, manuscript, manufacture, and manicure. In Old English the words wer and wīf were used to refer to "a man" and "a woman" from which we get werwolf and wife.

Belladonna - Literally “fair lady” in Italian, belladonna can mean a deadly plant used to enhance beauty in the 15th century, or it can mean an equally venomous woman.

Colleen - an unmarried girl

Coquette - a woman who flirts lightly.

Dowager - any high-class, wealthy, or dignified elderly woman

Doyenne - the feminine version of a badass leader who possesses the trifecta for power: seniority, authority, and rank.

Duenna - a female guardian

Harridan - a particularly vicious older woman

Mavourneen - From the Irish for “my love,” a mavourneen is a darling.

Termagant - A trouble-making woman, prone to fits of violence or brawling

Regina - Regina has long been the official title for a queen

Slattern - an untidy or slovenly lady.

Virago - Once meant a woman of extraordinary stature, strength, and courage; a woman who has the robust body and masculine mind of a man - a female warrior. It's come to mean a domineering, violent, or bad-tempered woman.

June 4, 2017

Living the Handmaid's Tale

I’ve lost count of the articles I’ve read about Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” that used the word “timely.” Timely, that is, in the sense of the presidency of Donald Trump.....The idea, ... America has become — or will become terrifyingly soon — a militant Bible-based patriarchy.... in which women have no rights, especially no reproductive rights, and are divided into rigidly stratified social classes whose very names give their status away....

As the New Republic’s Sarah Jones, one of the “timely” crowd, explains, “Of course, we don’t divide women into classes of Marthas, Handmaids, Econowives, and Wives; we call them ‘the help,’ ‘surrogates,’ the working class, and the one percent.”....

Instead of seeing Atwood’s fictional Gilead as a near-future militant fundamentalist Christian elite dystopia, we should see it as the mostly secularist elite dystopia we live in right now....

Take those elite-class Wives..... the tech and finance billionaires, the media and entertainment moguls who cluster in expensive ZIP Codes...Those folks aren’t known for their church-going, and they vote in favor of liberal social and economic causes from abortion and immigration rights to sustainable energy to higher taxes. They contribute heavily to political campaign, and with their upper-middle-class epigones they run the culture, deciding who gets banned on Twitter, which kinds of “diversity” are allowed on campuses, and what television programs we’ll be allowed to see. Today’s overclass Wives typically hold Ivy League degrees, “lean in” to high-status careers, and stand with Planned Parenthood.....

We also have a rigidly defined caste of Marthas (and “Marthos,” their male counterparts), because the Wives and their high-earning husbands need them to mop their floors, care for their children, mow their lawns and trim their trees, all for bargain-basement wages. ...

Finally, the Handmaids. As in the fictional Gilead, real-life elite-class Wives have something of a fertility problem, although it’s related not to environmental degradation but delayed marriages and childbearing attempts of women who pursue high-power careers. Thanks to 30 years of advances in egg-transfer technology since Atwood published her novel, today’s gestational surrogates don’t have to get into embarrassing “threesome” sexual positions with the Commanders and their Wives in order to do their jobs. And they tend to be drawn not from the ranks of political dissidents, but from the financially strapped Econowife class.....

Still, as in Gilead, there is definitely a class of female pariahs on whom the elites heap condescension, contempt and, when they can, punishment for holding views at variance with what the elites deem correct. They’re not called Handmaids, of course. They’re called Deplorables

5. We are treated as second-class citizens by female teachers.
12. We get laughed at if we get raped.
15. We are presumed guilty in the court of public opinion.
18. We don’t get believed when we say females bully us, too.
24. We get lonely and nobody cares.
25. We can’t be victimized by women according to the law.
30. We’re routinely trivialized as untrustworthy or evil.
32. We’re all viewed as potential rapists.
36. We have to tiptoe around every single conversation or interaction with a female in case they get ‘offended.’
41. We have no advocacy organizations.
42. We are the vast majority of the homeless population.
54. We have no real choice in the ‘pro-choice’ debate.
57. We suffer nearly all workplace deaths.
60. We’re automatically presumed to be the aggressor in all domestic disputes.
64. We are either invisible, expendable, a threat, or a wallet.

Predictably, "Lean In" has been a spectacular failure. "Sheryl Sandberg's 2013 book 'Lean In' has spawned lasting initiatives meant to spur the progress of women to positions of power in major corporations," writes author and professor Steven Rhoads. But such efforts have failed since "most women who have dependent children don't want to work full time, much less to put in the hours required of corporate titans."

A new study by the Council of Contemporary Families was released that shows fewer young people want gender equality at home! The study found an increase in the number of college-bound students who believe families are better off if men are "the achievers outside the home" and women "handled most of the family and domestic duties." There has also been "an uptick in the number who prefer the men to be dominant."

It seems to today's young people are wiser than the feminists who came before them. In fact, a mere "25 percent of the women Millennial voters and 15 percent of the Millennial men" identify as feminists. That's not because they've "shifted back to more traditional views of the roles of the sexes," notes Belinda Luscombe of Time but because, unlike feminists, they recognize the significance and value of domestic life and accept that sex differences are a vital component of any good marriage.

April 20, 2017

The many reasons why Millennials are shunning sex

Millennials Are Having Way Less Sex Than Their ParentsMore young adults born in the 1980s and 1990s are choosing not to have sex, according to the results of a new study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior....recent research, and some from the CDC, all points in this direction: that young adults these days have fewer sexual partners and are starting to have sex later.

One explanation from the study author Jean Twenge

Millennials and the generation after them have grown up with a strong emphasis on safety. “That may potentially impact their sexual behavior, if they’ve gotten the message that you can get sick or even die from sex.”

More than 42 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 59 are infected with genital human papillomavirus, according to the first survey to look at the prevalence of the virus in the adult population.

The report, published on Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics, also found that certain high-risk strains of the virus infected 25.1 percent of men and 20.4 percent of women. These strains account for approximately 31,000 cases of cancer each year, other studies have shown. HPV is a ubiquitous virus, the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States. About 40 strains of the virus are sexually transmitted, and virtually all sexually active individuals are exposed to it by their early 20s. Two vaccines are effective in preventing sexually transmitted HPV infection, and researchers said the new data lend urgency to the drive to have adolescents vaccinated.

The two biggest factors seem to be the copious amounts of pornography that millennials, in particular millennial men, have grown up consuming, and the widespread use of socially isolating social networking. Pornography and social media are disincentivizing young people from pursuing real romantic relationships.
--
Pornography destroys the dance and ritual of marriage....The Internet prevents us from developing relationships.For young men, porn convinces them that real women aren’t worth pursuing, while social media convinces them that not pursuing real women is perfectly normal. ...We begin the mating dance by following our animalistic urges. But, during the tango, we become human as we discover what it means to love and serve and belong to each other.

Noah Patterson, 18, likes to sit in front of several screens simultaneously: a work project, a YouTube clip, a video game. To shut it all down for a date or even a one-night stand seems like a waste. “For an average date, you’re going to spend at least two hours, and in that two hours I won’t be doing something I enjoy,” he said.

It’s not that he doesn’t like women. “I enjoy their companionship, but it’s not a significant part of life,” said Patterson, a Web designer in Bellingham, Wash. He has never had sex, although he likes porn. “I’d rather be watching YouTube videos and making money.” Sex, he said, is “not going to be something people ask you for on your résumé.”
--
Millennials have been called the most cautious generation — the first to grow up with car seats and bike helmets, the first not allowed to walk to school or go to the playground alone. The sense of caution sometimes manifests itself as a heightened awareness of emotional pitfalls. For example, some young people speak disparagingly of the messy emotional state love and lust can engender, referring to it as “catching feelings.”

Mitchell Aron in Laura Kipnis, Rape Culture, and the Disappearance of Sex sides with Northwestern professor Kipnis whose recent book Unwanted Advances examines the "rape culture" hysteria on college campuses and the extraordinary claim that 25% of women will be victims of sexual assault while in college.

A number of critics have dissected the flawed methodology on which this astronomical number is based, and noted that if true, it would mean that American college campuses are as, if not more dangerous than cultures that truly turn a blind eye to rape, such as Afghanistan or the Congo, where 48 women are raped every hour. I think most casual observers would have to be at least somewhat skeptical about the veracity of these claims; if actually true, would any parent with common-sense send their daughters to any institution in which she has a one-in-four chance of being raped?

...this same statistic used to prop up rape culture assertions is passed around as absolute truth in academia, without the slightest whiff of self-awareness and with complete credulity. The last time I was at an academic conference, the words “rape culture” were bandied about as if they were gospel and everyone in attendance accepted them as unquestioning truth. Either everyone believed or was too afraid to speak out.
--
As an NYC- based psychotherapist specializing in sexuality issues, I was not too surprised....I immediately thought of my clients, three young men who each separately had told me earlier in the year that they were terrified of casually hooking up due to fears of false rape accusations and confusion regarding policies such as affirmative consent.....

One client believed that the current climate on his campus was so toxic between the sexes, that he was already suspiciously viewed as a potential predator, and so he didn’t stand a chance to have a fair shot if things turned sour and a false accusation was leveled upon him. In other words, he felt disempowered, and fully responsible for anything that happened, including the choices of his partner, ranging from the amount of alcohol she decided to drink to whether she later decided to change her mind, even after the fact.....

Is it possible that all sexual risk is now completely shifted onto men?...Rape is a very serious accusation, one that ruins lives. By conflating regrets with sexual violence, and treating the punishment for regretful sex the same as the punishment for sexual violence, the net effect is a chilling of casual sexual interactions, especially amongst young people. And so, why is anyone surprised? And why doesn’t the media want to talk about it?....

Third-wave feminism, as evidenced by the relentless promotion of rape culture discourse, and turning a blind eye to its repercussions, isn’t really aiming for shared power, but rather a monopoly on power—sexual power, to be specific. And in the case of gender relations, sexual power allows for the dictation of all gender relations.

March 18, 2017

On beautiful women

"There are two kinds of women to whom I am attracted: bad ones and good ones"

....Over time — and I suppose age helps, though not as much as the young might suppose — I find that I have been developing "a preferential option for good women."...I am writing as a male, incidentally. Women will have to speak for themselves. Their attractions to men are beyond my comprehension.
---
When it comes to bad women, I find that my attention is focused, almost but not quite involuntarily, on those who just happen to be young and gorgeous. Whereas, when it comes to good women, my attention is captured by all ages. And whereas, in the first case, the idea of possession is never far away, in the second it disperses.....And often enough, unconventionally beautiful, as for instance certain old ladies, married or widowed or never married or nuns, who exquisitely embody the feminine principle. To be in their company is to be somehow washed, of that which makes one most grossly male.
----
Women have been not "objectified" in our culture so much as monetized; used as a sales tool. Every man who walks through our contemporary world is exposed to this gnawing devilry. Women are demeaned by the "soft" pornography that surrounds us; on the billboards, but also walking the streets. Actually it is quite hard pornography, by any traditional measure; one might even say it is exhausting. It enters not only the eyes of men, portals to the soul; but also the eyes and souls of the women. By increments they become what they behold.

There are women who are beautiful, as paintings. I could gaze on them all day. But in the moment lust enters the configuration, that beauty is destroyed. As anything else in the economy it becomes something to use then discard.

Broadly: Why do you believe men need to be free for women to be free?
Paglia: My primary inspiration since adolescence has been the thrilling decades of the 1920s and 30s, following American women gaining the right to vote in 1920. There were so many major women figures entering the professions—like my idols Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, who were determined to show that women could achieve at the same level as men. The bold new women of that period did not insult or denigrate men. They admired what men had done and simply demanded the opportunity to show that women could match or surpass it.One of my persistent quarrels with second-wave feminism is how male-bashing became its default mode from the start. Movements often attract fanatics or borderline personalities, and that's exactly what happened....

..... women can never be truly free until they let men too be free—which means that men have every right to determine their own identities, interests, and passions without intrusive surveillance and censorship by women with their own political agenda. For example, if there is an official Women's Center on the Yale University campus (which there is), then there should be a Men's Center too—and Yale men should be free to carry on and carouse there and say whatever the hell they want to each other, without snoops outside the door ready to report them to the totalitarian sexual harassment office.

Broadly: The book argues that construction workers and other working class men's work have gone unnoticed....
Paglia: It is an absolute outrage how so many pampered, affluent, upper-middle-class professional women chronically spout snide anti-male feminist rhetoric, while they remain completely blind to the constant labor and sacrifices going on all around them as working-class men create and maintain the fabulous infrastructure that makes modern life possible in the Western world. Only a tiny number of women want to enter the trades where most of the nitty-gritty physical work is actually going on—plumbing, electricity, construction. Women have played virtually no role in the erection of those magnificent towers in every major city in the world. It's men who operate the cranes or set the foundations or wash windows on the 85th floor. It's men who troop out at 2:00 AM during an ice storm to restore power to neighborhoods where falling trees have brought down live wires. It's men who mix the stinking, toxic cauldrons to spread steaming hot tar on city roofs. Last year in a nearby town, I drove by a huge, chaotic scene where emergency workers in hazmat suits were struggling with a giant pipe break, as raw sewage was pouring into the street. Of course all those workers up to their knees in a torrent of thick brown water were men! I've seen figures indicating that 92 per cent of people killed on the job are men—and it's precisely because men are heroically doing most of the dangerous jobs in modern society. The bourgeois blindness of feminist leaders to low-status working-class labor by men is morally corrupt! Gay men, on the other hand, have always shown their awed admiration of working-class masculinity and fortitude. It's no coincidence that a buff construction worker in a hard hat was one of the iconic personae of the gay disco group, the Village People, during the Studio 54 era!

August 22, 2016

Transgender cult and contagion

Let’s be clear: The vast majority of kids who experience a period of discomfort with their biological sexual identity eventually desist. Indeed, the number may well be over 90 percent. In other words, kids who are growing and learning about life and themselves sometimes endure a period of confusion. This should shock exactly no one. What is shocking, however, is the insistence that this period of confusion should be treated as a period of confirmation — and that medical intervention is the logical and tolerant next course. Indeed, transgender diagnoses have become so fashionable that doctors are sometimes stampeding to prescribe life-altering drugs even to kids — and then later, when the kids grow up, recommending mutilating surgery. In other words, doctors aren’t necessarily waiting for evidence of “consistence, insistence, and persistence.”

Watch this searing YouTube from a young woman who “de-transitioned” in her early twenties and describes herself as “a real, live, 22-year-old woman with a scarred chest and a broken voice and a five-o-clock shadow because I couldn’t face the idea of growing up to be a woman.”

Or watch this video from a young woman who speaks of “trauma that led to me disassociating from my female body,” She says, “The longer I chased that disassociation — the more I asked people to call me special pronouns, the more I tried to change my body, the more I ensconced myself in a community that would affirm a trans identity — the worse I felt.”
[videos at link]...

Here in the United States, the evidence is more anecdotal, but the anecdotes are disturbing. Rod Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative has become something of a clearinghouse for concerns from anguished parents, many of whom note that entire peer groups seem determined to transition together. This letter was particularly poignant: As a parent living the nightmare of having a teen who suddenly announces she’s transgender, I can tell you there are NO doctors who will do anything but agree. There is NO science behind this. There is NO way to medically “diagnose” her. Her therapist knows that she is not transgender but fears there’s no way we can stop her. Three of her closest friends have already had full transition, paid for by their parents, so it is difficult for her to understand why we won’t do the same. It is no different than having your child captured by a cult, only this time the cult is a societal bandwagon which wants to do permanent physical harm to her perfectly healthy female body, all in the name of “love”.

Parents have no idea how to respond, especially when doctors permit no dissent. ...

We’re not far from the day when a child will be taken from a loving home simply because the parents refuse to believe that their little girl is actually a little boy. We’re already living in the days when telling your girl child that she shouldn’t undergo treatments that will render her infertile and painfully mutilated is deemed to be intolerant.

Earlier this year, I contacted a scientist about a strictly scientific question related to biology and homosexuality, but he refused to comment. I found that strange, because my question wasn’t ideologically loaded at all. It was just scientific, and his answer presumably would have been too. He said that in academia, there is among professors now such fear of the mob that many of them figure it’s safer to keep one’s mouth shut rather than say something that one of these young Jacobins will take as offensive, no matter how absurd that reading is, and then set about ginning up the mob to destroy the scholar’s professional life.

If this isn’t McCarthyism, what is? It doesn’t become any less McCarthyist because it’s done by the cultural left.

God help the poor parents living this nightmare with their children, because the kind of professionals — doctors and others — who ought to be there reining in this insanity appear to have been totally compromised.

The new reactionaries are convinced that one of the cornerstones of French culture, ‘freedom of expression’, is dying. They reject ‘post-colonial guilt’ and are appalled by ‘cultural relativism’. To get down to the nitty-gritty, they take the view that France’s sovereignty is under threat from Arab immigration. Europe’s migration crisis has highlighted their fears, and the lip service that President Hollande pays to Angela Merkel’s refugee-quota system — widely unpopular in France — has further aided the reactionaries’ arguments.

What progressive ideas have in common is that when put into practice they seem to cause people to be miserable. Multiculturalism removes people’s sense of comfort and community, replacing it with alienation and atomisation. Secularisation may lower social capital. Egalitarianism makes people feel like failures because it offers them largely false hopes of rising socially. Sexual liberation is based on the contradiction of sexual equality and sexual freedom, which clash just as surely as economic freedom and equality; and intense sexual competition makes people unhappy…..

In fact the book’s characters appear to be so weary of the 68er society that they willingly accept a traditional faith that, by restoring men and women to their tradition roles, makes most people happier. I don’t know if he’s simply being provocative, but one of the great paradoxes of the sexual revolution is how unhappy it makes women.

Michel Houellebecq's latest novel is Soumission (Submission) about a future Islamic takeover of France was published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. It is a best-seller throughout Europe and throughly controversial, both acclaimed and denounced

A digested read in one page at The Guardian and here are excerpts from two reviews at Amazon

“Extraordinary . . . if there is anyone in literature today, not just in French but worldwide, who is thinking about the sort of enormous shifts we all feel are happening, it’s [Houellebecq].” ―Emmanuel Carrere, Le Monde

“A work of real literary distinction . . . [Houellebecq] has been the novelist who has most fearlessly and presciently tackled the rise of Islamic extremism in recent years . . . He is a writer with a gift for telling the truth, unlike any other in our time – I’ve been consistently saying he is the writer who matters most to me for many years now. I’ve read Submission twice in the last week with ever growing admiration and enjoyment. There’s been no English-language novel this good lately. With Submission Houellebecq has inserted himself right into the centre of the intellectual debate that was already raging in France about Islam and identity politics . . . There is nobody else writing now more worth reading.” ―David Sexton, Evening Standard

The life it depicts is a perfectly ordinary French middle-class life. François is in his mid-40s, a professor at the Sorbonne, he lives alone, eats microwave dinners in front of the TV in the evenings, his romantic relationships are fleeting, a year at most, usually with one of his female students. …..

The main reason François’s ennui never really seems significant,…..coincides with the massive political upheaval France is undergoing in front of his very eyes. An election is coming up, and the mood across the country is tense, there are armed street battles and riots in several towns, right-wing radicals clash with various ethnic groups, and yet the media avoid writing about it, the problem is played down, and people seem weary and resigned.

.It is this theme that lends the novel its narrative thrust and which of course is the reason for all the attention it has received, for anything that has to do with immigration, the nation state, multiculturalism, ethnicity and religion is explosive stuff in Europe these days . Many of its elements are recognizable, like the newspapers omitting to mention, or mentioning only with caution, conflicts arising out of ethnic differences, or the political left’s anti-­racism overriding its feminism, making it wary of criticizing patriarchal structures within immigrant communities, say, but in this novel all is brought to a head, taken to its most extreme conclusion, in a scenario of the future that realistically is less than likely, and yet entirely possible. What’s crucial for the novel is that the political events it portrays are psychologically as persuasive as they are credible, for this is what the novel is about, an entire culture’s enormous loss of meaning, its lack of, or highly depleted, faith, a culture in which the ties of community are dissolving and which, for want of resilience more than anything else, gives up on its most important values and submits to religious government…….

a depiction of a class of people helplessly enclosed within its own bubble, without the faintest idea what’s going on outside or why, a bit like the aristocracy before the revolution, it is also realistic, because when a person has grown up in a certain culture, within a certain societal system, it is largely unthinkable that that culture, that system, might be changed so radically, since everything in life — the beliefs instilled in us as children at home and at school, the vocations we are trained in and to which we later devote our labor, the programs we watch on TV and listen to on the radio, the words we read in newspapers, magazines and books, the images we see in films and advertising — occurs within the same framework, confirming and sustaining it, and this is so completely pervasive that to all intents and purposes it is the world, it is society, it is who we are. Minor modifications and adjustments take place all the time, of a political nature, too — sometimes the right is in charge, sometimes the left, and the greens may win a percentage of ground — but total upheaval isn’t even a faint possibility, it is simply unimaginable, and therefore does not exist.

And yet society’s total upheaval is what “Submission” depicts. ….this entire seamless revolution is seen through the eyes of François, a man who believes in nothing and who consequently is bound by nothing other than himself and his own needs. ….This lack of attachment, this indifference, is as I see it the novel’s fundamental theme and issue, much more so than the Islamization of France, which in the logic of the book is merely a consequence. What does it mean to be a human being without faith?

August 10, 2015

Links to interesting stories that I don't have the time to blog

The American public, we the people, lately swoon into a morass of multi-dimensional failure: failure to control their economic lives, to regulate their appetites and their bodies, to understand what is happening to them, to fend off the propaganda and distractions that disable them, and to properly express and direct their wrath at those elements of the polity who deserve it.

True, their awful, epic failures at this moment in history are largely engineered and aggravated by those who have captured the polity and turned it into a looting and racketeering engine. The net result, though, is a self-reinforcing circle of degradation that rots the collective ethos of the public while it destroys the vessel of the republic that contains it.

The EPA was investigating pollution from the long-ago abandoned Gold King Mine, which is located about 80 miles north of New Mexico. The EPA was apparently trying to clean up the waste water, but instead managed to burst a plug holding it in, thereby releasing slug that contained zinc, iron, copper and other heavy metals.

Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 1,472%. Sweden is now number two on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa.

“I think that iPhones and dating apps have really changed the way that dating happens for our generation,” says Stephanie, the one with an arm full of bracelets.

“There is no dating. There’s no relationships,” says Amanda, the tall elegant one. “They’re rare. You can have a fling that could last like seven, eight months and you could never actually call someone your ‘boyfriend.’ [Hooking up] is a lot easier. No one gets hurt—well, not on the surface.”

The brave British marksman saved the terrified eight-year-old and his father after taking out the crazed jihadi with a head shot from 1,000 metres away. The special forces crack shot then killed two other members of the hated terror group, who were also taking part in the sick planned execution.

ISIS militants had decreed that the little boy and his father must die after branding them "infidels" because they refused to denounce their faith. They were just seconds from death when the hero sniper intervened to stop the barbaric killing in the Syrian desert. The pair were part of the minority Shia sect of Islam which ISIS considers to be heretical.

February 27, 2015

Camille Paglia, an interview with the "Catholic Pagan"

Although raised Catholic in an Italian-American family, Professor Paglia left Catholicism in her youth and embraced the sexual revolution. Nevertheless, she still cites Italian Catholicism as the strongest influence on her personal identity. On Feb. 22, I conducted the following email interview with Professor Paglia about her secular work and its Catholic influences.

Q. You’ve been teaching at University of the Arts since 1984. What do you love most about your job?

C.P. There is no doubt that my commitment to the vocation of teaching is part of my Catholic heritage. I view classroom teaching as a discipline and duty, a responsibility to convey the legacy of the past to the next generation. As I strictly monitor attendance and enforce order, I sometimes ruefully feel like a teaching nun from the over-regulated era of my upstate New York youth…..My faith in that nurturing continuity is certainly diametrically opposed to the cynically subversive approach of today's postmodernist theorists, who see history as a false or repressive narrative operating on disconnected fragments.
--
Q. In your view, what’s wrong with American feminism today, and what can it do to improve?

C.P. After the great victory won by my insurgent, pro-sex, pro-fashion wing of feminism in the 1990s, American and British feminism has amazingly collapsed backward again into whining, narcissistic victimology. As in the hoary old days of Gloria Steinem and her Stalinist cohorts, we are endlessly subjected to the hackneyed scenario of history as a toxic wasteland of vicious male oppression and gruesome female suffering. College campuses are hysterically portrayed as rape extravaganzas where women are helpless fluffs with no control over their own choices and behavior. I am an equal opportunity feminist: that is, I call for the removal of all barriers to women's advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women, which I reject as demeaning and infantilizing. My principal demand (as I have been repeating for nearly 25 years) is for colleges to confine themselves to education and to cease their tyrannical surveillance of students' social lives.If a real crime is committed, it must be reported to the police. College officials and committees have neither the expertise nor the legal right to be conducting investigations into he said/she said campus dating fiascos. Too many of today's young feminists seem to want hovering, paternalistic authority figures to protect and soothe them, an attitude I regard as servile, reactionary and glaringly bourgeois. The world can never be made totally safe for anyone, male or female: there will always be sociopaths and psychotics impervious to social controls. I call my system "street-smart feminism": there is no substitute for wary vigilance and personal responsibility.

Q. what is post-structuralism and what is your opinion of it?

C.P. Post-structuralism is a system of literary and social analysis that flared up and vanished in France in the 1960s but that became anachronistically entrenched in British and American academe from the 1970s on. Based on the outmoded linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and promoted by the idolized Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, it absurdly asserts that we experience or process reality only through language and that, because language is inherently unstable, nothing can be known. By undermining meaning, history and personal will, post-structuralism has done incalculable damage to education and contemporary thought. It is a laborious, circuitously self-referential gimmick that always ends up with the same monotonous result. I spent six months writing a long attack on academic post-structuralism for the classics journal Arion in 1991, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf" (reprinted in my first essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture). Post-structuralism has destroyed two generations of graduate students, who were forced to mouth its ugly jargon and empty platitudes for their foolish faculty elders. And the end result is that humanities departments everywhere, having abandoned their proper mission of defending and celebrating art, have become humiliatingly marginalized in both reputation and impact.

February 25, 2015

Mary Eberstadt, "Beneath the swagger and snarl of jailhouse feminism is something pathetic: a search for attention (including, obviously, male attention) on any terms at all".

Feminism has become something very different from what it understands itself to be, and indeed from what its adversaries understand it to be. It is not a juggernaut of defiant liberationists successfully playing offense. It is instead a terribly deformed but profoundly felt protective reaction to the sexual revolution itself. In a world where fewer women can rely on men, some will themselves take on the protective coloration of exaggerated male characteristics — blustering, cursing, belligerence, defiance, and also, as needed, promiscuity.

After all, the revolution reduced the number of men who could be counted on to serve as protectors from time to time, and in several ways. Broken homes put father figures at arm’s length, at times severing that parental bond for good. The ethos of recreational sex blurred the line between protector and predator, making it harder for many women to tell the difference. Meanwhile, the decline of the family has reduced the number of potentially protective men — fewer brothers, cousins, uncles, and others who could once have been counted on to push back against other men treating mothers or sisters or daughters badly. In some worse-off neighborhoods, the number of available men has been further reduced by dramatic rates of incarceration. And simultaneously, the overabundance of available sexual partners has made it harder to hold the attention of any one of them — as has the diminished social and moral cachet of what was once the ultimate male attention-getter, marriage.

It’s a predator’s market out there. The fact that there’s no cottage industry related to “stud-shaming,” or even such a word, says it all. Many women are now exactly what feminists say they are: victims — only not in the way that feminism understands. They are captives behind enemy lines, but the enemy is not patriarchy or gender-norming. It’s the sexual revolution itself. And like other people held hostage for too long by a hostile force, these women are suffering from a problem that has had a name for some time. It’s Stockholm syndrome.

Modern sexual existence, frightened as it is of a life it does not control, implements techniques of power – pornography, menstrual suppression, abortion, surgery, systematic gender theory, and all the rest – to strip sexuality of its otherness, rendering it absolutely subject to our desires….. the price of trans-mutating our dominant relationship with our own sexuality into a relationship of the controlling and the controlled has been, paradoxically, an increased dependence on structures of power to maintain this control.

The independence that contraception, sterilization and abortion give us from our fertility is achieved by a simultaneous dependence upon pharmaceutical companies, surgeons, abortionists. The independence pornography gives our sexual arousal from actual encounters with another is achieved by an increased dependence on the pornography industry, on its stars, producers — and slaves. The freedom the ever-growing system of gender theory gives us from binary sexual identities is bought at the price of a dependence on academics to define and validate the pansexual from the omnisexual, the nonsexual from the asexual, the biromantic or the two-spirited from the polyamorous and bisexual. The freedom of divorce is a dependence on the legal system, and the independence surgery gives us from our bodies is simultaneously a dependence on surgeons — and the cash we owe them. Every liberating innovation in the erotic sphere has trailed the chain of an increased dependence on impersonal structures of power behind it. The will to power has made us powerless.

February 16, 2015

Another great argument for all male and all female colleges -UPDATED with more

"I recently assisted a young man who was subjected by administrators at his small liberal arts university in Oregon to a month-long investigation into all his campus relationships…"
"… seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them(an immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy), and who was ordered to stay away from a fellow student (cutting him off from his housing, his campus job, and educational opportunity) — all because he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away. He was found to be completely innocent of any sexual misconduct and was informed of the basis of the complaint against him only by accident and off-hand. But the stay-away order remained in place, and was so broadly drawn up that he was at constant risk of violating it and coming under discipline for that. When the duty to prevent a 'sexually hostile environment' is interpreted this expansively, it is affirmatively indifferent to the restrained person’s complete and total innocence of any misconduct whatsoever."
From a Harvard Law Review Forum piece called "Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement/ Backing off the hype in Title IX enforcement"by lawprof Janet Halley. (Boldface added.)

I'm with every one of the commenters who urged suit against the college for such an egregious violation of that young man's rights.

I began to wonder what it must be like to be a young man at university, sitting through course after course after course, whether it was an English course, a history course, a philosophy course, or sociology, whatever, and just hearing about how the whole history of humanity had been a history of men oppressing women. And how, even now, supposedly, he should feel bad about his ‘privileges’.

Hearing over and over again about how they’re responsible for all the bad things in the world, that if there were fewer men or they were just less manly, somehow we wouldn’t have any more war and everyone would live abundant, peaceful lives, and if women were more collectivist oriented and egalitarian… All these things demonstrably not true if anyone has ever spent time in a women’s organization or lived with a bunch of women.

So what happened to those boys who, in 2001, were falling behind girls at school, were less likely to go to college, were being given drugs they did not need and whose self-esteem and confidence issues haven't just been ignored, but have been actively ridiculed by the feminist Establishment that has such a stranglehold on teaching unions and Left-leaning political parties?

In short: they grew up, dysfunctional, under-served by society, deeply miserable and, in many cases, entirely unable to relate to the opposite sex. It is the boys who were being betrayed by the education system and by culture at large in such vast numbers between 1990 and 2010 who represent the first generation of what I call the sexodus, a large-scale exit from mainstream society by males who have decided they simply can't face, or be bothered with, forming healthy relationships and participating fully in their local communities, national democracies and other real-world social structures.

I was attacked by a swarm of Stepford students this week. On Tuesday, I was supposed to take part in a debate about abortion at Christ Church, Oxford. I was invited by the Oxford Students for Life to put the pro-choice argument against the journalist Timothy Stanley, who is pro-life. But apparently it is forbidden for men to talk about abortion. A mob of furious feministic Oxford students, all robotically uttering the same stuff about feeling offended, set up a Facebook page littered with expletives and demands for the debate to be called off. They said it was outrageous that two human beings ‘who do not have uteruses’ should get to hold forth on abortion — identity politics at its most basely biological — and claimed the debate would threaten the ‘mental safety’ of Oxford students. Three hundred promised to turn up to the debate with ‘instruments’ — heaven knows what — that would allow them to disrupt proceedings.
--
It’s hard to think of any other section of society that has undergone as epic a transformation as students have. From freewheelin’ to ban-happy, from askers of awkward questions to suppressors of offensive speech, in the space of a generation…..

This is what those censorious Cambridgers meant when they kept saying they have the ‘right to be comfortable’. They weren’t talking about the freedom to lay down on a chaise lounge — they meant the right never to be challenged by disturbing ideas or mind-battered by offensiveness. …We’re witnessing the victory of political correctness by stealth. …This is a disaster, for it means our universities are becoming breeding grounds of dogmatism.

December 1, 2014

A Memorable Assignment

OregonMuse at Ace of Spades tipped me off to the The English Assignment which I found it hysterical and which illustrates better than I could ever do, the differences between teen-age boys and teen-age girls.

Sharon Melnicer asked her Grade 12 English students to pair off with the person sitting to their immediate right. One would write the first paragraph of a short story and email to their partner who would write the second paragraph, continuing back and forth in tandem until the story was done. Here's what two students Maria and Neil turned in.

(First paragraph by Marla) "At first, Betty couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favourite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Bruce, who once said, in happier times, that he also adored chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Bruce. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question. She'd switch to chai."

(Second paragraph by Neil) "Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Bruce Harrington, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Zontar 3, had more important things to think about than the neurotic meanderings of an air-headed, asthmatic bimbo named Betty with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. 'A.S. Harrington to Geostation 17,' he said into his transgalactic communicator. 'Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far …' But before he could sign off, a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit."

They were doing just what their teacher wanted them to do. However, its main them, The Feminization of --Well, Everything is not so amusing. How many boys are turned off reading because as one commenter put it :

We allow a feminized educational system to force-feed [Margaret] Atwood, [Maya] Angelou, [Alice] Walker, et al. to teenaged boys whose instincts at that age are profoundly bored with emotive introspective feminista literature. They want action, adventure, bold canvases, far horizons, male protagonists: all the things these books do not have.

Then we're surprised and shocked to learn that we've turned off those boys to reading for the rest of their adult lives, to the considerable detriment of their cultural and educational prospects.

The other day the brilliant space scientist Dr Matt Taylor was asked to give a report on the progress of Philae, the astonishing little landing craft that has travelled, in all, four billion miles to become the first representative of humanity to visit the surface of a comet. Dr Taylor leant forwards. He started to speak. Then his voice went husky, and it became painfully obvious to viewers that he was actually crying. And of course he has many very good reasons to feel emotional. The London-born astrophysicist has been part of a mind-blowing success.
---
I watched that clip of Dr Taylor’s apology – at the moment of his supreme professional triumph – and I felt the red mist come down.It was like something from the show trials of Stalin, or from the sobbing testimony of the enemies of Kim Il-sung, before they were taken away and shot. It was like a scene from Mao’s cultural revolution when weeping intellectuals were forced to confess their crimes against the people.
--
Yes, I suppose some might say that his Hawaii shirt was a bit garish, a bit of an eyeful. But the man is not a priest, for heaven’s sake. He is a space scientist with a fine collection of tattoos, and if you are an extrovert space scientist, that is the kind of shirt that you are allowed to wear.

Let's look at some of the hypocrisy as well as smoke and mirror tactics we've been seeing throughout #Shirtstorm that has become too common in our modern online world. This is not true feminism, which should really be called "equalism" or "humanism" to retain it's true meaning.

It’s one thing to say that Taylor would have been better served wearing a tie, even a clip-on, on his big day; it’s another to accuse him of a dastardly betrayal of women in science. Any young woman interested in science who will be deterred from pursuing her dream because of one garish shirt worn by one scientist who was practically unknown the day before yesterday needs bucking up. Thank heavens Marie Curie wasn’t so delicate, or she never would have won one Nobel Prize, let alone two.

The overreaction to Taylor’s shirt doesn’t just implicitly send the message that women are helplessly vulnerable to the smallest of unintended slights; it makes feminists look witlessly censorious and absurdly humorless, not that they ever seem to care.

Matt Taylor is everything we’re told science shouldn’t be about or look like. Cigar chomping, greased hair, tattooed, bowling shirt wearing badass. He just didn’t land a robot on a comet, he throat punched science’s preconceived notions of what a rocket engineer is supposed to look like. He came off as a real life Chris Knight cracking whip smart comebacks against his corrupt professor Hathaway and his socially awkward, sexually frustrated, minion Kent and loving every single minute of it. How could progressive feminist journalists not go after him?
--
The upside in all of this is that there was real push back for once against this ghoulish, leftist cult of intolerance and it far extended the reach of internet subcultures. Actual members of the web news media stood up…..This was a big bang moment where perhaps feminists in media realize they are not above criticism nor is the lynch mob they send and the progressive past time of grievance hunting is coming to an exhaustive end, simply because they are running out of people to defend them. his was a big bang moment where perhaps feminists in media realize they are not above criticism nor is the lynch mob they send and the progressive past time of grievance hunting is coming to an exhaustive end, simply because they are running out of people to defend them. Matt Taylor, after working with a team that spent several years obsessing and caring on something, and celebrating an accomplishment no one in the history of human kind had ever done, had his head in the stars.

Taylor’s shirt may not have been in great taste. But the outcry against it is the latest, most blatant example of feminism turning into its own caricature: a Sisterhood of the Perpetually Aggrieved, far more interested in shaming and bashing men for petty offenses than in celebrating female achievement.--
Sadly, the brouhaha over Taylor’s shirt overshadowed not only his accomplishments but also those of his female teammates, including one of the project’s lead researchers, Kathrin Allweg of the University of Bern in Switzerland. More spotlight on Allweg, Grady, Alexander and the other remarkable women of the Rosetta project would have been a true inspiration to girls thinking of a career in science. The message of ShirtStorm, meanwhile, is that aspiring female scientists can be undone by some sexy pictures on a shirt—and that women’s presence in science requires men to walk on eggshells, curb any goofy humor that may offend the sensitive and be cowed into repentance for any misstep.Thanks for ruining a cool feminist moment for us, bullies.

In the last week alone, we saw the social media outrage machine (with assists from friendly journalists, of course) force Time to apologize for including “feminist” in a cheeky poll of which words should be “banned” from overuse or misuse. (It had won the poll by a wide margin before the thought police cracked down and forced its removal.) Bloggers and writers at The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books all called on Time to renounce the inclusion of “feminist” in the poll.
--
That’s it. Enough already. Enough. Enough. Enough. Whether we want to or not, we have to deal with our feminist bullying problem.--
Feminist bullies are so invested in the false idea that women are oppressed that they’re giving all women a bad reputation. Women, contrary to the image perpetuated by feminist bullies, are not weak. We are strong. We can handle all sorts of things and do so every day. We live full lives with complex and meaningful relationships and we have many professional and personal accomplishments. Women and girls are able to navigate life quite well, thank you very much, and it’s actually easier when women aren’t constantly talking about how supposedly oppressed we are. We’re not. I mean, sure, everyone in life has troubles. None of those troubles, for the vast majority of women, include “seeing a dude wear a shirt while discussing how he just landed a spaceship on a literal freaking comet.”
--
It’s not just women who are hurt by feminist bullies. Everyone is. That’s because human relationships are harmed in the toxic outrage culture. The very perpetuation of humanity relies on men and women getting along well. People who stoke resentment and anger between the sexes, or create false claims about women’s oppression, are making it more difficult for happy, healthy, human relationships to flourish.

And just the waste of time we’ve all had to expend on this is also bad for society. No offense (or be offended, I don’t care) but people with gender studies degrees don’t land spacecraft on flying comets. They frequently detract from same with endless pointless conversations about imagined grievances.

"Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature."

Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

The disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two weeks ago is the latest in a long series of girls-gone-missing cases that often end tragically. ...

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense….

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

Liberalism lacks a profound sense of evil ….Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

September 4, 2014

"It fell on my ears as a ludicrous scheme"

Published in 1970, the book Sexual Politics by radical feminist Kate Millet was required reading in the nascent women's movement. So influential was she that Kate Millet was inducted into the U.S. National Women's Hall of Fame in 2013.

Her sister Mallory Millet after living in Southeast Asia with her American executive husband, filed for divorce and relocated to New York City with her young child to join her sister Kate where she became "an unwitting witness to history". In Front Page magazine Mallory writes about the devastating legacy of her sister in Marxist Feminism's Ruined Lives.

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China. We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:

“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”

Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears. Was I on planet earth? Who were these people?

They proceeded with a long discussion on how to advance these goals by establishing The National Organization of Women. It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of Western society. The upshot was that the only way to do this was “to invade every American institution. Every one must be permeated with ‘The Revolution’”: The media, the educational system, universities, high schools, K-12, school boards, etc.; then, the judiciary, the legislatures, the executive branches and even the library system.

It fell on my ears as a ludicrous scheme, as if they were a band of highly imaginative children planning a Brinks robbery; a lark trumped up on a snowy night amongst a group of spoiled brats over booze and hashish.

How could twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable — clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar; the uncle of one was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt — plot such a thing? Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable and good. How did these people rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity? And why?

August 21, 2014

"Sex change is biologically impossible"

Dr. Paul McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, writes in the Wall Street Journal, Transgender Surgery Isn't the Solution

Policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.
--
With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one's maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.
--
You won't hear it from those championing transgender equality, but controlled and follow-up studies reveal fundamental problems with this movement. When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25% did have persisting feelings; what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned.
---
We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into "sex-reassignment surgery"….stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a "satisfied" but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.
---
At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. "Sex change" is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

July 18, 2014

The Unhappiest Worker

Psychology Today offers a profile of the unhappiest workers in America today. She is female, in her forties, unmarried with no children, earning less than $100k a year and in a professional position such as doctor or lawyer. --

A more comprehensive analysis of trends in subjective well-being across several decades came to similar conclusions regarding female happiness. In The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness published by the American Economic Journal, researchers Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that although women's life circumstances have improved greatly over the past few decades by most objective measures, their happiness has declined—both in absolute terms and relative to men's.

This is so sad. I know many women who fit this profile. They ignored their biological nature, postponed marriage and swallowed the feminist ideal of being a self-sufficient super achiever, unburdened with children. So, they have no one to love, no one to care for, no one to give them emotional support. Except for cats.

By contrast, the profile of the happiest worker is a married male, with a young child, in a senior management position, earning between $150k - $200k and a wife who works part-time.

March 28, 2014

Some shocking quotes from feminists

"Housewives] are dependent creatures who are still children…parasites" - Gloria Steinim

"No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." - Simone de Beauvoir
"[Housewives] are mindless and thing-hungry…not people. [Housework] is peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls. [It] arrests their development at an infantile level, short of personal identity with an inevitably weak core of self…. [Housewives] are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps. [The] conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife. " Betty Friedan
Quotes sourced by Genevieve Wood via Stuart Schneiderman who asks Who Are the Real Misogynists?

Sunshine Mary has sympathy for a victim, a baffled spinster who wonders why she can't find a husband despite being in shape and making $100k a year who wrote "I just wanted to make things clear I didn’t “sleep around.” Most of my relationships have been long term I have only been with 18 guys”

Feminists have sold young women a bill of goods, that they can live like men, work like men, have sex like men, and then turn back into women when they feel like it. We laugh at a woman like this sometimes and make fun of her and say, “Didn’t she know that she’d end up like this?”

No, she didn’t know that. That’s because when you are 17 years old, you don’t know much, especially in this culture of extended adolescence. And when you have been told from a very young age that, as a girl, it is your destiny to Have It All exactly When You Want It, I’m sure it is very baffling to find yourself in your thirties with no husband and none in sight, with the dawning realization that your job and lonely apartment are not nearly as fulfilling as being a wife and mother would have been…..

However, what most of us don’t seem to understand is that young women make the terrible choices that they are making because they are told from an early age that these are actually good choices. Some girls are able to resist that message, which saturates every aspect of the media and schools, but most girls aren’t, and they don’t develop the necessary wisdom until it is too late.

The Fantasy of Gender Liberation

This week marks the 40th anniversary of an event close to the hearts of gender activists everywhere. On March 11, 1974, ABC aired Marlo Thomas’ “Free to Be…You and Me” — a musical program celebrating gender-free children. Thomas and her fellow co-neutralists envisioned a world where the sex distinction would melt away. Instead of “males” and “females,” there would be mutually respectful, non-gendered human persons. The project resulted in a platinum LP, a best-selling book, and an Emmy. More than that, the idea of gender liberation entered the national zeitgeist. Parents everywhere began giving their daughters trucks and sons baby dolls. Like so many dream boats floating on the utopian sea, this one crashed and sank when it hit the rocks of reality.
--
But, after 40 years of gender activism, boys and girls show few signs of liking to do the same things. From the earliest age, boys show a distinct preference for active outdoor play, with a strong predilection for games with body contact, conflict, and clearly defined winners and losers. Girls, too, enjoy raucous outdoor play, but they engage in it less. Girls, as a rule, are more drawn to imaginative theatrical games — playing house, playing school — as well as exchanging confidences with a best friend. Boys playing kickball together in the schoolyard are not only having a great deal of fun, they are forging friendships with other males in ways that are critical to their healthy socialization. Similarly, little girls who spend hours in deep conversation with other girls or playing theatrical games are happily and actively honing their social skills. What these children are doing is not only fun but developmentally sound.
--
“One of the largest and most persistent differences between the sexes is children’s play preferences.” The female preference for nurturing play and the male propensity for rough-and-tumble hold cross-culturally and even cross-species. Researchers have found, for example, that female vervet monkeys play with dolls much more than their brothers, who prefer balls and toy cars. Nor can human reality be tossed aside. In all known societies, women tend to be the nurturers and men the warriors.
--
Of course, we can soften and shape these roles, and that has been, in every epoch, the work of civilization. But civilization won’t work against the grain of human nature, and our futile attempts to make it do so can only damage the children that are the subjects of the experiment.
--
The writer Andrew Sullivan is right when he describes the sex difference as “so obvious no one really doubted it until very recently, when the blank-slate left emerged, merging self-righteousness with empirical delusion.” That delusion was jumpstarted in 1974 with the advent of “Free To Be… You and Me.” Today, an army of gender scholars and activists is marching in support of the genderless ideal. But these warriors forget that ignoring differences between boys and girls can be just as damaging as creating differences where none exist. “Free to Be” is a cautionary example of how an idealistic social fantasy can turn into a blueprint for repression.

March 20, 2014

"Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education"

Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.

The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.

Above all, girls need life-planning advice. Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion. Adolescent girls must think deeply about their ultimate aims and desires. If they want both children and a career, they should decide whether to have children early or late. There are pros, cons and trade-offs for each choice.
--
Sex education has become incoherent because of its own sprawling agenda. It should be broken into component parts, whose professionalism could be better ensured.

First, anatomy and reproductive biology belong in general biology courses taught in middle school by qualified science teachers….

Second, certified health educators, who advise children about washing their hands to avoid colds, should discuss sexually transmitted diseases at the middle-school or early-high-school level. But while information about condoms must be provided, it is not the place of public schools to distribute condoms, as is currently done in the Boston, New York and Los Angeles school districts. Condom distribution should be left to hospitals, clinics and social-service agencies.

Similarly, public schools have no business listing the varieties of sexual gratification, from masturbation to oral and anal sex, although health educators should nonjudgmentally answer student questions about the health implications of such practices. The issue of homosexuality is a charged one. In my view, antibullying campaigns, however laudable, should not stray into political endorsement of homosexuality or gay rights causes. While students must be free to create gay-identified groups, the schools themselves should remain neutral and allow society to evolve on its own.

February 8, 2014

Women more at risk for stroke then men. UPDATED

Women of all ages should pay more attention to the risk of stroke than the average man, watching their blood pressure carefully before they think about taking birth-control pills or getting pregnant, according to a new set of prevention guidelines released Thursday.

Women are also more likely to have risk factors associated with stroke, such as migraines, depression, diabetes and the abnormal heart rhythm known as atrial fibrillation.

The guidelines from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association were the first such recommendations aimed at preventing strokes in women. Stroke is the fourth-leading cause of death for all Americans and a leading cause of disability. It’s the third-leading cause of death for women, after heart disease and cancer.

Women are more likely to report pain and mobility issues three months after having a stroke than men of the same age
They are also more likely to report anxiety or depression
-
The greatest gender difference is seen in those over 75.
One year after having a stroke women are still more likely to have a lower quality of life than men.
--
The study showed that marital status was the most important factor separating the quality of life in men and women with those who are single faring less well.

January 3, 2014

The real gender war is against boys and men

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," said Camille Paglia who wrote A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues. in the Wall St Journal's interview of her last weekend that everyone is talking about and with which I couldn't agree more.

The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation….But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization. She starts with military service ……

"The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians "lack practical skills of analysis and construction") to what women wear. "So many women don't realize how vulnerable they are by what they're doing on the street," she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.
--
Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."
---
She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts. By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda."
---
Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

…. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones" condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says. "Our culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly,"

Visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment.

Or

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Punishing boys for kissing a girl on the cheek, eating a poptart so it looks like a gun, imaginary arrows, pointing a pencil like a gun

We also have noted Dr. Helen Smith’s book Men on Strike regarding how similar policies through college and beyond have had a negative impact………

Dr. Helen rightly points out that when you reward the “Uncle Tims” at the expense of the “White Knights”, and decry masculinity as evil, then self-serving behavior will be the result. She notes, “as you sow, so shall you reap.”

So we watch reality shows to see what real men are like. Victor Davis Hansen Good Ol’ Boy, Inc.

So good-ol’-boy reality offers glimpses, premodern though they may be, of unrestrained freedom. ….The crabmen and lumberjacks don’t seem to worry about what they say or whom they offend — to the degree that such screw-it attitudes can be hinted about on politically correct camera. They are not fellow subjects who live among us in our kingdom of lies, in which you both dare not confess to profiling and dare not walk in a particular Philadelphia neighborhood.

A recent study by two MIT economists found that men, not women, are less likely to graduate from high school and finish college. As a result, the study said, "over the last three decades, the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition, employment rates, occupational stature and real wage levels."

Men have always felt comfortable in clubs, fraternities, and other exclusive groups. Membership implies discretion: What happens at the Rotary Club stays at the Rotary Club, enabling men to open up and speak frankly. While men enjoy access to these types of bonds in, say, college fraternities, these places vanish in adulthood.

The erosion of “male space,” as psychologist Helen Smith convincingly argued in her otherwise problematic book, “Men on Strike,” has played a key role in the social isolation of men. “Our culture has steadily made it almost obscene for men to congregate on their own together,” Smith writes. “Men are discouraged and actively made fun of or denied the ability to be in all-male groups by the law and by the disapproval of certain segments of the culture.

December 17, 2013

It's a Man's World

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.
---
It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.
----
After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role—but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

these four young men represent i a challenge to the common portrayal of male friendship in our popular culture. It is difficult to find, especially on television, an example of male friendship (outside of the military or law enforcement) that is neither transactional nor idiotic. For cheap beer, it’s the wingman trope. In sitcoms, it’s stupid men doing stupid things in stupid attempts at liberation from wives or girlfriends. Male friendships, we’re taught, are about finding or fleeing women; they are not valuable in themselves.
--
The implicit promise that is so appealing is not that this whiskey will bring you a beautiful wife, but that it will bring you worthy friends to see you off on that marital journey.

And most men desire this friendship—this tender, warm, (dare we say it?) loving friendship—but that desire receives no affirmation in our culture.

“Study: Having daughters makes parents more likely to be Republican.”
--
Things are more complicated than you thought, liberals! You can love your daughters, want the best for them, and find yourself drawn to … conservative ideas! Especially if you’re highly educated, which is where the effect was strongest!
--
But as a father of girls and a parent whose adult social set still overlaps with the unmarried, I do have a sense of where a daughter-inspired conservatism might come from, whatever political form it takes.

It comes from thinking about their future happiness, and about a young man named Nathaniel P.

But his type does exist, in multitudinous forms, wherever successful young people congregate, socialize, pair off. He’s not the worst sort of guy by any means — not a toxic bachelor or an obnoxious pick-up artist. He’s well intentioned, sensitive, mildly idealistic. Yet he’s also a source of immense misery — both short-term and potentially lifelong — for the young women in his circle.

“Contrary to what these women seemed to think,” Waldman writes of Nathaniel P.’s flings and semi-steady girlfriends, “he was not indifferent to their unhappiness. And yet he seemed, in spite of himself, to provoke it.”

He provokes it by taking advantage of a social landscape in which sex has been decoupled from marriage but biology hasn’t been abolished, which means women still operate on a shorter time horizon for crucial life choices — marriage, kids — than do men. In this landscape, what Nate wants — sex, and the validation that comes with being wanted — he reliably gets. But what his lovers want, increasingly, as their cohort grows older — a more permanent commitment — he can afford to persistently withhold, feeling guilty but not that guilty about doing so.

There’s a popular feeling in the air that America has become decadent. Contrasting Harry Potter to the Hunger Games shows what a difference a decade can make.
--
The moral universe of Harry Potter might best be summed up by a quote from the movie version of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. In that movie, one of the characters say that some believe “it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I’ve found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness, and love.”
--
The political system is broken in Harry Potter, and only by working as renegades outside it can our heroes ultimately save it. But revolution or rebellion is never seriously considered; the state isn’t the enemy to be fought as much as it is an impediment to achieving righteous goals.
--
With the Hunger Games, we’re in a much darker and more complicated universe. Harry Potter features scenes of torture and death, but in the Hunger Games the violence has systematic, state backing from beginning to end. The state isn’t just hidebound and inefficient; rather, it’s the very actor that sets up and sustains structures of violence (the eponymous “hunger games,” deadly contests in which children are forced to fight to the death in order to remind defeated rebels of the government’s power).
--
In the larger context of the series, the real enemy isn’t just one particular tyrant, but political authority in general.

December 13, 2013

Two studies on Brain Wiring: the differences between the sexes and paternal deprivation

Once again, science demonstrates what we already knew. Men and women are very different and they complement each other. That is unless you are one of those who believe that 'social constructs' and personal preference trump biology. What neuroscience can give us is a fresh start to understanding how diseases affect the two sexes differently.

By far the most interesting study in this past week is the last one: the first research showing that paternal deprivation during development affects the neurobiology of the offspring.’

A new brain connectivity study from Penn Medicine published today in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences found striking differences in the neural wiring of men and women that's lending credence to some commonly-held beliefs about their behavior.
--
"These maps show us a stark difference--and complementarity--in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others," said Verma.

For instance, on average, men are more likely better at learning and performing a single task at hand, like cycling or navigating directions, whereas women have superior memory and social cognition skills, making them more equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that work for a group. They have a mentalistic approach, so to speak.
--
"It's quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are," said Dr. Ruben Gur.

How politically incorrect of science to suggest that men and women are not only different, but — egad! — apparently designed to complement each other. Almost as though they are meant to fulfill each other.

Neurologists used magnetic resonance imaging (radio-wave scans that produce detailed images of the inside of the body) to study the brains of almost 1,000 volunteers. The differences between the genders were so profound that men and women might almost be separate species.

Men generally have more connections within each hemisphere and between the front and back of the brain. In women the stronger connections usually run from side to side, between the left and right hemispheres.

In essence, what this means is that men are more logical and better at coordination and spatial awareness. Women are more intuitive, have greater 'emotional intelligence' and better memories for words and faces.

"It certainly is incendiary," said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology and director of the University of Southern California's Imaging Genetics Center. He is directing an effort to assemble a database of 26,000 brain scans from 20 countries to cross-check neuroimaging findings. "People who look at findings about sex differences are excited or enraged," he said.

Combined brain scans of 949 subjects, ages 8 to 22, show how neural connections differ by gender. Male brains, top, have more connections within hemispheres (blue lines). Female brains, bottom, have more between hemispheres (orange lines). Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences/University of Pennsylvania

Researchers are looking at the variations to explain the different ways men and women respond to health issues ranging from autism, which is more common among men, and multiple sclerosis, which is more common among women, to strokes, aging and depression. "We have to find the differences first before we can try to understand them," said Neda Jahanshad, a neurologist at USC who led the research while at the University of California, Los Angeles.
---
"In childhood, we did not see much difference" between male and female, Dr. Verma said. "Most of the changes we see start happening in adolescence. That is when most of the male-female differences come about."

Growing up without a father could permanently alter the structure of the brain and produce children who are more aggressive and angry, scientists have warned. Children brought up only by a single mother have a higher risk of developing ‘deviant behavior’, including drug abuse, new research suggests.
It is also feared that growing up in a fatherless household could have a greater impact on daughters than on sons.
----
Dr Gabriella Gobbi, who carried out the research with colleagues at the medical faculty at McGill University in Canada, said: ‘This is the first time research findings have shown that paternal deprivation during development affects the neurobiology of the offspring.’

The research, which was carried out on mice, compared the social behavior and brain anatomy of youngsters with two parents to those growing up with mothers alone. The team said the findings had direct relevance to human society. They used California mice, which, like humans, are monogamous and raise their offspring together.

Mice studies in the laboratory may therefore be clearer to interpret than human ones, where it is impossible to control all the influences during development.’
The brains of the fatherless mice developed differently, Dr Gobbi said, with the main impacts seen in the prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain which controls social and cognitive activity.
----

December 10, 2013

Hooking Up

In the ’80s, if I suggested in class that there might be any problem with sexual liberation, they said that everything was fine—what was I talking about? Now if I raise questions, many of them speak differently. They still live like libertines, sometimes they still talk like libertines, but it’s getting old. They are beginning to sound like the children of third-generation Maoists. My generation may have ordered the sexual revolution, but theirs is paying the price.

I am not speaking only of the medical price. To be sure, that price is ruinous: At the beginning of the revolution, most physicians had to worry about only two or three sexually transmitted diseases, and now it is more like two or three dozen. But I am not speaking only of broken bodies. Consider, for example, broken childhoods. What is it like for your family to break up because dad has found someone new, then to break up again because mom has? What is it like to be passed from stepparent to stepparent to stepparent? What is it like to grow up knowing that you would have had a sister, but she was aborted?
--
We human beings really do have a design, and I mean that term in the broadest sense: not merely mechanical design (this part goes here, this part goes there) but also what kind of being we are. Because the design is not merely biological but also emotional, intellectual, and spiritual, the languages of natural law, natural design, natural meanings, and natural purposes are intertranslatable, and most of the time interchangeable. Some ways of living comport with our design. Others don’t.

The problem with twenty-first-century Western sexuality is that it flouts the embedded principles and the inbuilt meanings of the human sexual design.
--
Mutual and total self-giving, strong feelings of attachment, intense pleasure, and the procreation of new life are linked by human nature in a single complex of meanings and purpose. For this reason, if we try to split them apart, we split ourselves. Failure to grasp this fact is more ruinous to our lives, and more difficult to correct, than any amount of ignorance about genital warts. It ought to be taught, but it isn’t.

The problem is that we don’t want to believe that these things are really joined; we don’t want the package deal that they represent. We want to transcend our own nature, like gods. We want to pick and choose among the elements of our sexual design, enjoying just the pieces that we want and not the others. Some people pick and choose one element, others pick and choose another, but they share the illusion that they can pick and choose. Sometimes such picking and choosing is called “having it all.” That is precisely what it isn’t. A more apt description would be refusing it all—insisting on having just a part—and in the end, not even getting that.

In one awful high-profile case after another—the U.S. Naval Academy; Steubenville, Ohio; now the allegations in Maryville, Mo.—we read about a young woman, sometimes only a girl, who goes to a party and ends up being raped. As soon as the school year begins, so do reports of female students sexually assaulted by their male classmates. A common denominator in these cases is alcohol, often copious amounts, enough to render the young woman incapacitated. But a misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril.
--
Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.
--
I’ve told my daughter that it’s her responsibility to take steps to protect herself. (“I hear you! Stop!”) The biological reality is that women do not metabolize alcohol the same way as men, and that means drink for drink women will get drunker faster

Before you knew it, Yoffe’s example of responsible parental advice had produced a feminist freak out. From Katie Baker to Amanda Hess to Erin Gloria Ryan to Ann Friedman to Emma Gray the voices of contemporary feminism rose up to denounce Yoffe for, they seemed all to believe, blaming the victim and going easy on the male perpetrators of these heinous crimes.

If I may summarize it, they seemed to be reasoning that when a woman is raped it is not her fault. True enough. Thus, any suggestion that she might have avoided placing herself in a dangerous situation can make her feel that she was at fault, and thus will impede her recovery.
---
Here’s another proposal: how about teaching men that they have a manly duty to protect and defend women. Not merely in the most egregious situations where a woman is in danger, but in the smaller gestures that signify protectiveness. That might mean picking a woman up at home before a date; it might mean escorting her home after a date; it might mean opening doors for her and helping her to carry heavy packages.

It would mean behaving like a gentleman and treating women like ladies.

One understands that such thoughts might provoke yet another feminist freak out. Women are independent; they do not need men to protect them; they can take care of themselves; they have taken judo classes. Why not try to change the culture so that men are encouraged to demonstrate more respect and more gentlemanly concern for women

Camille Paglia on Gender

Last week I attended a debate at American University between dissident feminist Camille Paglia and AU gender scholar Jane Flax. The topic: “Gender Roles: Nature or Nurture?” Flax gave a polite and respectable defense of an exhausted idea: “gender is a social construction.” But Paglia stole the show. She deftly reminded the audience that Mother Nature tends to get the final word—and is not a feminist. I watched the faces of astonished and fascinated undergraduates as Paglia shattered the sacred icons of contemporary gender studies. By the end of the evening, even three sullen hipsters sitting next to me seemed to be won over.

Women’s studies programs were rushed into existence in the 1970s partly because of national pressure to add more women to faculties that were often embarrassingly all-male. Administrators diverting funds to these new programs were less concerned with maintaining scholarly rigor than with solving a prickly public relations problem. Hence women’s studies was from the start flash-frozen at that early stage of ideology, which might be described as militant social environmentalism. In my view, biology and endocrinology should have been built as required courses into the curriculum of every women’s studies program in the country

…..No deviation was permitted from the party line, which was that all gender differences are due to patriarchy, with its monolithic enslavement and abuse of women by men.
….
Male academics, sensing which way the wind was blowing, were reluctant to challenge the new power structure and shrank back out of fear of being labeled sexist and retrograde. History will not be kind to their timidity and cowardice. There was a kind of contemptuous indifference in it.
---
A volatility in gender roles is usually symptomatic of tensions and anxieties about larger issues. That is, sexual identity becomes a primary focus only when other forms of identification and affiliation—religious, national, tribal, familial—break down. Furthermore, while androgyny or transgender fluidity is currently regarded as progressive, such phenomena have at times helped trigger a severe counter-reaction that could last for centuries.
--
Our present system of primary and secondary education should be stringently reviewed for its confinement of boys to a prison-like setting that curtails their energy and requires ideological renunciation of male traits. By the time young middle class men emerge from college these days, they have been smoothed and ground down to obedient clones. The elite universities have become police states where an army of deans, sub-deans and faculty committees monitor and sanction male undergraduate speech and behavior if it violates the establishment feminist code. The now routine surveillance of students’ dating lives on American campuses would be unthinkable in Europe.
--
there is something fundamentally constant in gender that is based in concrete facts.
--
Extravaganzas of gender experimentation sometimes precede cultural collapse, as they certainly did in Weimar Germany. Like late Rome, America too is an empire distracted by games and leisure pursuits. Now as then, there are forces aligning outside the borders, scattered fanatical hordes where the cult of heroic masculinity still has tremendous force. I close with this question: is a nation whose elite education is increasingly predicated on the neutralization of gender prepared to defend itself against that growing challenge?

"It's better to hold the door for a woman than to let it slam in her face."

Ordinary people are seeing that chivalry contributes to healthy relationships. A recent study in the academic journal Psychology of Women Quarterly found that chivalry is associated with greater life satisfaction among men and women. An initiative called the Gentlemen’s Showcase, led by college women on campuses across the country for the past few years, rewards young men for helping out others in need. And perhaps most important, a major study of more than 10,000 people from around the world — one of the largest studies of its kind — found that the No. 1 attribute that both young men and women seek in a mate is not money or beauty or intelligence, but kindness, which lies at the heart of the chivalrous act.
--
Being good — being noble — is also at the heart of chivalry. As a society, we can agree that certain types of behavior are better than others. It is, for instance, better to hold the door open for a woman than to let it slam in her face; it is better to give up your seat to someone in need rather than let that person stand in your stead; it is better to forgo a late-night cab when a stranger with young kids needs it more.

Chivalry is, as Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield might say, a manly virtue, but that does not mean that women cannot be chivalrous too. The essence of chivalry is self-sacrifice. Whether or not we name that selflessness chivalry, the compassion that stands behind it is something we should celebrate.

Glenn Reynolds comments "Chivalry was a system, and one that made demands on women every bit as much as on men."

One commenter said, "Women were expected to behave in a chaste manner and be loyal to their husbands and supportive (in the traditional woman's role sense) of the warriors who were sacrificing for them."

Reynolds replied, "Precisely. It was a system involving mutual obligations; with one set deemed obsolete, it's absurd to expect the other set to continue as before."

Both sexes rated the characteristics 'kind-understanding' and 'intelligent' higher than earning power and attractiveness in all samples, suggesting the species-typical preferences may be more potent than sex-linked preferences.

Previous research has claimed that that average personality differences between men and women are small.

But the new analysis published in the Public Library of Science One journal revealed that each sex shares a distinct set of characteristics, with just 18 per cent of men having a typically "female" set of traits or vice versa.

April 2, 2013

"What's wrong with wanting to be happy sooner?"

Hard-core feminists are on the decline, even on the run and not soon enough for me. I'm tired of the scolds and their plan for how women and men should live their lives. I'm sick of the way so many will insult and denigrate women who refuse to follow the feminist orthodoxy. The women in revolt against a toxic, sexualized culture who don't want to be 'empowered sexually' but value modesty and chastity in themselves and others. The women who want to get married and have children and sacrifice for their welfare. The women who don't want to juggle a high-paced career anymore, but want to stay home with their young children. The women who don't see a successful career as the be-all and end-all of life. The women who don't believe that sexual differences are culturally determined, but are inherent in biology, even in the wiring of the brain. The women who love men, want them to flourish and glory in the difference between the sexes.

Of course, I'm happy that women who want to have successful careers can do so. But overall, the advice feminists give young women is bad advice. Too many young women do not know just how important love and family is to a 'successful' , fulfilling, well-lived life. That sleeping around for a decade or two does serious psychological damage and impairs a woman's ability to give and receive love. That their choice of a mate is the most important decision they will ever make and that it's much better to marry and have children earlier than later. That having a child outside of marriage just because you want one is far too often detrimental to the child and to the greater society.

Just a couple of weeks ago, New York magazine ran a piece by Lisa Miller called The Retro Wife that attracted an enormous amount of attention because it signaled a major shift in the way people speak about feminism. They are talking like reasonable adults and questioning feminist dogma.

Feminism has fizzled, its promise only half-fulfilled. ---
The revolution that Friedan helped to spark both liberated women and allowed countless numbers of them to experience financial pressure and the profound dissatisfactions of the workaday grind. More women than ever earn some or all of the money their family lives on. But today, in the tumultuous 21st-century economy, depending on a career as a path to self-actualization can seem like a sucker’s bet.
--
Now Kelly is 33, and if dreams were winds, you might say that hers have shifted. She believes that every household needs one primary caretaker, that women are, broadly speaking, better at that job than men, and that no amount of professional success could possibly console her if she felt her two young children—­Connor, 5, and Lillie, 4—were not being looked after the right way. The maternal instinct is a real thing, Kelly argues: Girls play with dolls from childhood, so “women are raised from the get-go to raise children successfully. When we are moms, we have a better toolbox.” Women, she believes, are conditioned to be more patient with children, to be better multitaskers, to be more tolerant of the quotidian grind of playdates and temper tantrums; “women,” she says, “keep it together better than guys do.”

She referenced the male to female death ratio on the Titanic, and declared that “self sacrifice and heroism are not exclusive to men,” “but they are distinctive to men.” Students scowled behind their wayfarers. She railed against affirmative action, a family court system skewed unjustly to favor mothers over fathers, and the deep vein of anti-Western sentiment running through academic feminism that makes it okay to decry gender inequality in the West, and keep quiet about vaginal mutilation and honor killings in the East.

Feminism was in part a failure of wit. It mistook fiction for reality and thought men really were dominant. Now, increasingly, men are redundant, women are overburdened, and what pass for families are producing fewer and worse-developed children. It's gotten so bad that even the New York Times and Third Way are beginning to notice. Alas, the situation probably will have to get worse still before it can get better.

A new gender gap has emerged--one where girls and young women outperform boys and young men in both education and key aspects of the workforce. This gap could be as much about social family structure as it is about economic forces like the demise of labor unions, globalization, and rapid changes in technology. Authors David Autor and Melanie Wasserman make the case that the decline in male achievement is almost exclusively reserved for males born into single-parent households; while females in single-parent households do OK, boys seem to suffer.

The latest reasonable adult to speak out is Susan Patton, the "feminist pioneer that today's feminists hate". James Taranto writes Susan Patton Told the Truth

In 1973 she was admitted to Princeton University as part of only the fifth coeducational class in the school's history. It took some bravery for the young Miss Patton to go to Princeton, for she was not a legacy and was anything but a daughter of privilege. As she explained in a 2006 article for Princeton Alumni Weekly, her mother was a survivor of Auschwitz, a German death camp in Poland; her father, of Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany. After the war they settled in the Bronx.

On Friday this feminist pioneer found herself transformed into a feminist hate object after the Daily Princetonian student newspaper published her letter to the editor. The paper's website has been overwhelmed by traffic, so with Patton's permission we're reprinting the letter in full:
--
Here's what nobody is telling you: Find a husband on campus before you graduate. Yes, I went there.
--
Smart women can't (shouldn't) marry men who aren't at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again--you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

Her advice went viral. True believing feminists were horrified. They threw themselves into such high dudgeon that you thought they had seen a witch. If you had ever been tempted to believe that contemporary feminism is about giving women the freedom to choose the way they conduct their lives, this episode will hopefully cure you.

If demonstration were needed, the Patton kerfuffle shows unmistakably that feminism wants to dictate the way women live their lives. In less flattering terms, they want to own young women’s lives. Feminists are happy to allow young women to participate in all manner of self-destructive behavior as long as they do not commit the greatest crime against the feminism. That would be: marrying young.

Patton addressed herself to the daughters she never had and told them that their years at Princeton were a golden opportunity to snag a great husband. To her mind, Princeton men were great husband material. Nearly all of them are available. A bright and nubile young coed should take advantage of the fact that the younger she is the more choice she will have. Thus, the younger she is the more power she has in the dating marketplace. Suggesting that as women age the pool of eligible men shrinks, Patton recommends that these women make Princeton a happy husband hunting ground.

Why are we so reluctant to admit that it is hard to find eligible men (and women?) to marry? Why are people afraid to admit that, OK, the world of dating is sometimes thrilling and fun … but quite often, horrible and lonely? What's wrong with wanting to meet someone in college, presumably someone with whom you have shared experiences and stuff in common, and opt out of dealing with the crappy dates, the mystery texts, and the questioning looks from Auntie Mildred at the Thanksgiving table? And more to the point: What's wrong with wanting to be happy, sooner? -
--
Sometimes you really do have to be strategic in the hunt. That isn't retro; it's calculating, practical, maybe protective

March 18, 2013

Four Signs Your Relationship Might Be Doomed

Dr. John Gottman studied couples for over thirty years and discovered the four communication qualities that could predict a couple will break up—with over 90% accuracy. Called "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," these predictors have also been linked to physical illness and disease.

Criticism: Not just feedback or even criticism that isn't constructive, but rather an attack on the other person's character or interests. As Gottman explains in the video above, it's an attitude one partner has in diagnosing the other person's personality defects—and even wanting to be praised for that diagnosis!

Defensiveness: Here, one person plays "the innocent victim."

Contempt: The biggest predictor of a failing relationship is contempt. One person takes on an air of superiority (thinking he/she is more intelligent, a better parent, more tidy, etc.) and looks down on and insults the other person. Gottman says this is also a predictor of infectious illnesses for the person on the receiving end. If your partner corrects your grammar while you're arguing with him/her, that's a huge red flag.

Stonewalling: The person just tunes you out and withdraws.
All couples experience conflict, but the strongest ones deal with it with more respect. If your relationship shows any of the above signs, all may not be lost, but it's a good indicator that you and your partner need to work better together to keep the relationship from falling apart.

February 27, 2013

"No one should be forced to live according to the ‘new religion’ as though it alone were definitive and obligatory for all mankind."

In the name of tolerance, tolerance is being abolished

“In the name of tolerance, tolerance is being abolished; this is a real threat we face. The danger is that reason – so-called Western reason – claims that it has now really recognized what is right and thus makes a claim to totality that is inimical to freedom. I believe that we must very emphatically delineate this danger. No one is forced to be a Christian. But no one should be forced to live according to the ‘new religion’ as though it alone were definitive and obligatory for all mankind.”Pope Benedict XVI

Last week the Massachusetts Department of Education issued directives for handling transgender students – including allowing them to use the bathrooms of their choice or to play on sports teams that correspond to the gender with which they identify.

The 11-page directive also urged schools to eliminate gender-based clothing and gender-based activities – like having boys and girls line up separately to leave the classroom.
Schools will now be required to accept a student’s gender identity on face value.
---
The new rules would also prevent teachers and administrators from telling parents with which gender their child identifies.
“School personnel should speak with the student first before discussing a student’s gender nonconformity or transgender status with the student’s parent or guardian,” the directive states.
---
The Massachusetts Family Institute denounced the new rules calling them a violation of privacy.

“Fundamentally, boys need to be using the boys’ room and girls need to be using the girls’ rooms, and we base that on their anatomical sex, not some sort of internalized gender identity,” said Andrew Beckwith, the institute’s general counsel.

Beckwith told Fox News the new policy has a “very broad standard that is ripe for abuse.”
“The policy allows students to have one gender identity at home and another at school,” he said. “And it refuses to let teachers and administrators tell parents what gender their child is at school.”

Another part of the directive that troubles parents deals with students who might feel comfortable having someone of the opposite sex in their locker room or bathroom.
The state takes those students to task – noting their discomfort “is not a reason to deny access to the transgender student.”

And any student who refuses to refer to a transgendered student by the name or sex they identify with could face punishment.

For example – a fifth grade girl might feel uncomfortable using the restroom if there is an eighth grade transgendered boy in the next stall.
Under the state guidelines, the girl would have no recourse, Beckwith said. “And if the girl continued to complain she could be subjected to discipline for not affirming that student’s gender identity choice,” he told Fox News. “It should not be tolerated and can be grounds for student discipline,” the directive states.

Gunner Scott, of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, praised the directive – and said punishing students who refuse to acknowledge a student’s gender identity is appropriate because it amounts to bullying.

January 25, 2013

The Real War Against Women

The real war is against women’s fertility. We are allowed to participate in higher education and the labor market, as long as we agree to act like men: We agree to chemically neuter ourselves during our peak child-bearing years. We agree to place our children in daycare when they are at their smallest and most vulnerable, that is, if we are lucky enough to have children. We have taken the university and the labor market as given, and adapted our bodies to them. I say that it is time we take our bodies as the givens, and insist that the labor market and the university adapt to us and our bodies.

Men who sound like spinster Sunday school teachers when talking to young boys

As I watched, I became aware of something that’s been gnawing at me for some time now. The young fathers and the not-so-young granddaddies had a peculiar way of speaking to the male children. They squatted down to be on eye level with the lads, or they leaned way over to appear less tall. And when they spoke, the mens’ voices were…feminine. I don’t mean lisping or mincing or effeminate. I mean feminine. No matter how low the voice might have been naturally pitched, the men without exception raised the pitch of their voices and lowered the volume until they sounded like spinster Sunday School teachers, whispering in calming tones, asking questions and making observations.

Each of these sentences was uttered with an upward inflection into the high tenor range, as if singing a campfire song. The younger men were the worst offenders; their facial expressions were all wide eyes and open mouths. They reminded me of 19-year old female daycare workers. But most of the older men were also doing some diluted variation of these techniques. None of them seemed like whole men in the presence of these male children.

And so I began to search my memory, and I could not recall a single adult male in my boyhood speaking to me or my friends in such tones. I cannot recall any men routinely squatting down or leaning over to make themselves appear closer to my own height. I cannot remember any men putting a breathless wheezing whisper into their words. I cannot bring to mind a single incident in which a grown man opened his eyes and mouth as wide as possible and talked to me like some grinning, masculine Norma Desmond. What I do remember are the grown men who picked me up and lifted me to their naturally imposing height, instead of lowering themselves to mine. And such lifting was always accompanied by a feeling of safety and strength. I’m pretty sure (and confirmed by my wife’s memories) that I never talked to our boys or to my nephews in such a manner. And I know very well that I have never vocally nor vertically neutered myself when interacting with my grandchildren.

The Pied Pipers of Feminism

It is often noted that teenage girls in America are out of control. Many of them think it’s cool to dress like prostitutes. Many think that the best way to show their love is to sext a picture of their genitals. Far too many of them suffer from eating disorders and other psychological problems.

If you ask who is leading them to these self-destructive behaviors, the answer does not lie in the home. Their mothers are most often horrified by what they see. Young girls and women no longer pay attention to their parents. They allow themselves to be led around by the Pied Pipers of feminism.

Feminist thinkers are telling young girls that they can dress as they please, revealing any or all of their intimacy, to whomever they please, and that anyone who does not like it is a repressive patriarch.
--
in the hands of one Lindy West, feminist thinking has become self-parody. … West declared war on modesty. To no one’s surprise she believes that the concept of modesty was invented to subjugate women. Being modest means not having the right to own property and not having the right to an abortion.
--
Telling girls and young women that they can go through life dressing the way you want and acting the way you want without suffering consequences is mindless and dangerous.

The feminist life plan has become the norm. Whether it’s ideology or peer pressure or both, Millennial young women—the under-30s-- have been induced to conduct their lives exactly as feminism would have wanted…..
But now, a growing number of Millennial women are beginning to fret over the unanticipated consequences of prioritizing our careers before love. And I only need to look at my group of friends to see this reality.

We are coming to the realization that we were unwittingly playing a game of musical chairs — while everyone was pairing up, those focused on our careers are left standing alone.

people who want to take care of people and can’t stand doing work that doesn’t relate to that should probably be parents. There are very few jobs that are truly just taking care of people. And most of them pay very poorly, if at all. So you may as well do it for your own family, where the pay is not so important. It’s ridiculous that we don’t think of taking care of a family as a career path. That’s a good path for some people. Just like earning a shit-load of money is a good career path for other people. In fact, those two types of people should marry each other.

I grew up as a product of second-wave feminism, having learned from the media that men were oppressive, foolish, and incompetent. Perhaps as a result, I spent nearly the first decade of my own marriage "fighting for my rights" with my husband. I criticized him and bossed him around. It wasn't that he was such a bad guy, but rather I was trained to spot potential oppression and domination by the male gender. I took personally his lack of attention to detail around the home or with the baby. I made a practice of letting him know his failings on a regular basis, expecting his behavior to change.

My methods made him feel defensive, and damaged our relationship. I soon found myself in a marriage with a man who stopped sharing his thoughts and feelings with me.
--
A decade later, I can say that those two concepts--"respect" and "submission"--saved my marriage. And it wasn't because I became a doormat or no longer communicated my feelings. I learned that Biblical submission, boiled down, is basically "don't be a contentious competitor to him." After learning that, I argued with him less. I stopped rolling my eyes with disgust when he had something to say - even if I thought it was not such a great idea at the time. I started practicing the Bible verse which reads, "Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and even slower to become angry."

I started asking him questions about his life. I started being interested in him again as a person. I decided he was more important to me than whether or not a dish made it into the dishwasher or his socks were left on the floor. There were even a few things he did that could be considered big mistakes that just didn't seem to matter as much when I viewed him as a person of worth. I could forgive him - and I saw my own flawed nature clearly.
--
I chose to give respect a chance because I am a Christian and try (emphasis on try) to follow the Bible's teachings on how to live. But even if I did not trust the Bible as much as I do, learning how to effectively communicate respect and love deeply impacts marriages.

We see these Biblical principles show up in marital success, as a recent (2005) study funded by a grant from the US Department of Justice demonstrates.

Pornography is not a victimless crime

It’s not often that I unleash my inner Mary Whitehouse, but the way young girls today are expected to conform to a hideous porn culture makes me want to don a pair of glasses with upswept frames and get myself one of those battleaxe perms. A friend’s daughter recently started at a highly regarded boarding school. When her mother asked how she was enjoying the mixed-sex environment, the girl said quietly: “You have to give the boys oral sex or they get cross.” Reeling with shock, the mum protested that her darling daughter did not have to do anything of the sort. “Oh yes you do,” replied the girl. “And you have to shave down there or the boys don’t like it.”
The girl in question is not some brazen, street-smart sixth-former; she is 14 years old. With a woman’s body, perhaps, but still a child. A child who, as far as her parents were concerned, was leading a sheltered middle-class life, not auditioning to become a professional footballer’s WAG. Teenagers have always had secrets, places where they go to try on their new selves, be it the pages of a padlocked diary or the back row of the movies. But mine is the first generation of parents that has to protect its young not just in the world we can see and hear, but in a parallel, online universe for which we barely know the password. And it’s really tough. Tougher even than we know.

What a world we have created where parents are clueless when it comes to the protection of their daughters. Pornography is not a victimless crime. Boys are stunted in their emotional, psychological and relational development by pornography. Girls are damaged in their development as they act out the pornographic fantasies of boys. Some will become so hardened that they can say along with Mary Elizabeth Williams, So what if abortion ends a life.

January 15, 2013

"The rights of children trump the right to children"

It was a "March for All" in Paris by an alliance of secularist, straight, gay, rightist, leftist and non-partisans, Catholics, Jews , Evangelicals and Muslims, all against gay marriage being imposed by the federal government without public debate.

Estimates of the numbers of participants who came from all over France to converge on Paris range from 360,000 to 1,000,000 with most settling on 800,000.

In France, a repeating refrain is “the rights of children trump the right to children.” It is a pithy but forceful philosophical claim, uttered in voices ranging from gay mayor “Jean-Marc” to auteur Jean-Dominique Bunel, who revealed in Le Figaro that two lesbians raised him. For most of France, LGBT rights cross the line when they mean that same-sex couples have a “right” to children—something that both France’s grand rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, and Louis-Georges Barret, Vice President of the Christian Democratic Party, have refuted as a right at all.
--
The right to a child, according to Bernheim and Barret, does not exist; it would mean changing children, as Bernheim says, from “child as subject” to “child as object.” Bunel states in Figaro that such a shift violates international law by denying the right of children to have a mother and a father. Bunel writes:

I oppose this bill because in the name of a fight against inequalities and discrimination, we would refuse a child one of its most sacred rights, upon which a universal, millennia-old tradition rests, that of being raised by a father and a mother. You see, two rights collide: the right to a child for gays, and the right of a child to a mother and father. The international convention on the rights of the child stipulates in effect that “the highest interest of the child should be a primary consideration” (Article 3, section 1).

there are many Americans who believe they have a right to "have children", and to treat children like projects or even experiments, as if they are blank slates that can be filled up with the whims of their parents (and others). In this perspective, children are objects that exist because we wish them to and make them so, not because they are gifts from God who come to us through the marital embrace, to be raised by a mother and father, who are also the primary educators of their children.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, told Vatican Radio the church supports cultural and social progress, but not "at the expense of nature." He said he wondered why so many people were so committed to protecting the environment from manipulation, but "not very concerned about manipulation against the inner workings of anthropology."

When social scientists discover something that increases life satisfaction for both sexes, shouldn’t they at least consider the possibility that they have come across something that is positive? Healthy? Something that might even conceivably be grounded in the nature of Homo sapiens?

Feminists often seem to be at war with human nature. How else can you explain the furor surrounding Suzanne Venker's article on The War on Men?

According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.
--
So if men today are slackers, and if they’re retreating from marriage en masse, women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation.

Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.

September 28, 2012

Carrying some of your little boy within you all of your life

A mother’s children are never far from her mind – and scientists may have worked out why. They believe that if a woman has a son, some of his cells pass into her body before reaching her brain. And the male DNA may linger there for decades.
--
In the same way that a mother passes oxygen and nutrients to her unborn child through the placenta, ‘traffic’, including cells, also moves in the other direction. The study suggests that the baby’s cells – or their descendants – persist in the mother for decades, as male DNA was found in the brain of a woman who died aged 94. It is thought having a daughter also leaves a mark on the mother’s brain – but testing for this would be more difficult.

The study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, is the first to find male DNA in women’s brains. It is too early to say what effect, if any, it has. Previous studies have found male cells in women’s blood, bone marrow, hearts, lungs, livers and other organs. And the phenomenon, which is known as microchimerism, is thought to be good for a woman’s health.

They are questioning why so much research into Alzheimer’s focuses on male brains — despite women being twice as likely to get the disease, and their brains having a fundamentally different make-up.

New studies show female hormones could be the reason women are more at risk, suggesting hormone replacement therapy could have a protective effect.
---
It’s well known that victims of Alzheimer’s have clumps of damaged proteins — called plaques and tangles — in their brains. Less well known is that depending on your sex, the tangles are found in very different places, according to Larry Cahill, professor of neurobiology at the University of California.
About 90 per cent of male sufferers have them in the hypothalamus, a central area of the brain controlling hunger, eating and sex — but only 10 per cent of women do, he says. Women have them in a nearby area involved in controlling production of a neurochemical called acetylcholine.

But why this is or what difference it makes to symptoms and behavior hasn’t been researched properly. Wherever the plaques or tangles are, men seem to be able to handle them better — women can have worse symptoms, even though they have much less damaged protein in their brains.
--
researchers from the University of Hertfordshire reported that women suffering from Alzheimer’s deteriorate faster than men — even when they are apparently at the same stage of the disease, suggesting men’s brains are better at coping with the ravages of the disease.

Furthermore, research from Kansas University found that if your mother had Alzheimer’s, that doubles your risk of developing the disease compared with having a father who had it.
--
‘Women with a certain variant of a gene called ApoE4 are 50 per cent more likely to develop Alzheimer’s,’ says Dr Pauline Maki, a psychiatrist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, with a special interest in brain-hormone links. ‘That was discovered 15 years ago and affects around 20 per cent of the population, but it has never been followed up.’

The world's leading pharmaceutical companies are downgrading the search for new treatments for Alzheimer's disease after the failure of a series of high-profile drugs trials.

The human and financial costs of the disease are growing rapidly as the population ages, but the prospects of treatments to halt it, or slow its progress, are receding as at least five trials in the past five years have delivered disappointing results.
---
At least 12 times as much was spent on cancer research as dementia research, yet dementia cost the country twice as much as cancer, he said.

Newborn Madden Hebert became his own uncle when his grandmother gave birth to him last week, the Portland Press Herald reported.

Madden’s mother, Angel Hebert, 25, was unable to have children due to a heart condition that made it unsafe for her to get pregnant.
According to the Herald, Hebert’s mother, 49-year-old Linda Sirois, had offered for years to be a surrogate mother for her daughter in case she could not get pregnant. Hebert and her husband, Brian, got the news last summer.
--
Sirois reached out to fertility clinics around New England. Many rejected her because of her age, but the Reproductive Science Center in Lexington, Massachusetts agreed to impregnate her by in-vitro fertilization (IVF) using Hebert's egg fertilized with Brian's sperm.

Men, Who Needs Them? In the New York Times, an op ed columnist with very strange ideas about biology, says men are not necessary for human reproduction. You were you before there was a you.

Think about your own history. Your life as an egg actually started in your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother. After the two of you left Grandma’s womb, you enjoyed the protection of your mother’s prepubescent ovary.

Hannah Rosin's much discussed essay in the Atlantic, Boys on the Side, claims female success and equality is due to the hookup culture

To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

that we should actively give parents the choice to screen out personality flaws in their children as it meant they were then less likely to "harm themselves and others".
--
He said that science is increasingly discovering that genes have a significant influence on personality – with certain genetic markers in embryo suggesting future characteristics. By screening in and screening out certain genes in the embryos, it should be possible to influence how a child turns out.

In the end, he said that "rational design" would help lead to a better, more intelligent and less violent society in the future. "If we have the power to intervene in the nature of our offspring — rather than consigning them to the natural lottery — then we should."

August 23, 2012

The male biological clock is "an extraordinary important force in evolution

Men delaying fatherhood have been told to consider freezing their sperm after a study showed they also have a rapidly ticking biological clock.

Researchers found older fathers pass down the majority of the faulty genes linked to conditions such as autism and schizophrenia.
Scientists in Iceland discovered 97 per cent of genetic mutations were caused by the age of the father, while the mother’s age had no effect at all.The child of a 40-year-old father had two-and-a-half times as many potentially damaging mutations as that of a 20-year-old, and the gap increased with every passing year.

Reacting to the study, Alexey Kondrashov, a professor of evolutionary biology at Michigan University, said if the findings were confirmed, ‘collecting the sperm of young adult men and cool-storing it for later use could be a wise individual decision’.

While it was suspected that the trend towards late fatherhood may be related to rising rates of autism, this was the first large-scale test.
--
Everyone has some genetic mutations, but on average children had an additional two for every year of the father’s life. A 20-year-old father transmitted on average 25 mutations to his child, while 40-year-old fathers, the oldest in the study, transmitted around 65.

The mother transmitted around 15, regardless of her age. Lead author Dr Kari Stefansson, of deCODE, a leading genetics firm in Reykjavik, said the father’s age was ‘an extraordinarily important force in evolution’, adding: ‘The number of mutations coming from the mother is constant, which makes sense as her eggs are formed before she is born, whereas men constantly generate sperm through to old age.

The very important conclusion we can draw from this is that the concern focused on the increasing age of mothers is probably misplaced. They may be off the hook, and men are on it – as disorders from these mutations are much more common than the risks associated with older mothers.’

The researchers, writing in the journal Nature, say the father’s age seems to increase problems with brain function – such as autism, schizophrenia and possibly dyslexia and low intelligence. However, while there is no increase in genetic mutations, older mothers are known to increase their child’s risk of more serious chromosome abnormalities, which make them more likely to miscarry or have children with Down’s syndrome.

August 21, 2012

"Something that contains great truths has been almost universally reviled"

BJ: It certainly underscored the importance of everything you’re talking about. Your book does not discuss health care but renders a more valuable service, which is to talk about the ramifications of widespread recreational sex and its effects. You pick up the baton from none other than Pope Paul VI, as you mention. You flesh out the predictions of his encyclical Humanae Vitae in your book’s last chapter very well. What did you find prophetic about it, and were you surprised it was as indicative as it turned out to be?

EB: I was indeed surprised. I did not read Humanae Vitae until just a few years ago, just a few years shy of its 40th anniversary, and when I finally read the document through I was just blown away by its understanding of what the world would look like if the sexual revolution proceeded.

The main thing that surprised me was its understanding of what would happen to the relation between the sexes. Humanae Vitae predicted that in a world of contraceptive sex, men and women would not get along as well, that once you sever procreation from recreational sex men would look down on women. He also advanced the idea that there would be a lowering of standards of conduct between the sexes. All of this, I argue, has come true, and yet the secular world has refused to acknowledge its truth. That to me is a paradox, because if you were to ask which document of modern times was the most unwanted and reviled document it would have be Humanae Vitae, right? Across the world, it is seen as a laughingstock in some places, as a profoundly undesired testament in others, yet this document contains more truth about the sexual revolution and the world it would usher in than any other document.We’re left here with a great paradox – I really believe that – that something that contains great truths has been almost universally reviled. And that in itself was justification enough to undertake this book.

July 29, 2012

The Decline of Male Intimacy

In my unending search for just the right vintage images for our articles, I have looked through thousands of photographs of men from the last century or so. One of the things that I have found most fascinating about many of these images, is the ease, familiarity, and intimacy, which men used to exhibit in photographs with their friends and compadres.
---

“Boys imitate what they see. If what they see is emotional distance, guardedness, and coldness between men they will grow up to imitate that behavior…What do boys learn when they do not see men with close friendships, where there are no visible models of intimacy in a man’s life beyond his spouse?” -

April 27, 2012

Why Women Make Less Than Men

In studies from the U.S. to Sweden, pay discrimination can't explain the disparity. Women earn less because they work fewer hours.
---
The main reason that women spend less time at work than men—and that women are unlikely to be the richer sex—is obvious: children. Today, childless 20-something women do earn more than their male peers. But most are likely to cut back their hours after they have kids, giving men the hours, and income, advantage.
--
Women, in fact, make up two-thirds of America's part-time workforce
---
A 2007 Pew Research survey came up with similar results for American women: Among working mothers with minor children, 60% said they would prefer to work part-time, while only 21% wanted to be in the office full-time (and 19% said they'd like to give up their job altogether). How about working fathers? Only 12% would choose part-time and 70% wanted to be full-time.

April 12, 2012

The End of Women

The great gift of the sexual revolution to women is not that it has taken them out of men’s power but that it has made them over as the new men. They can pursue their careers just like men. They can have sex without getting pregnant and having to get married, just like men. They can ignore the emotional consequences of uncommitted sex (“And how bad are heartaches, anyway?” asks Rosin) as men tend to do.

When the ache for a baby gets too strong, today’s macho woman can go get herself impregnated with donor sperm at a fertility clinic. And since there’s really no difference between men and women any more she could just settle down with a lesbian partner and save herself any further trouble from the officially male of the species.

The truth is that, if men have become redundant, so have women. One makes no sense without the other. What we have instead is humanoids who come in a range of genders and can make use of their sexual endowment (or someone else’s) in a variety of ways. They can generate or acquire children as the case may be; they can saddle the kids with two “moms” or two “dads” or with other combinations of “parents” if it suits them. What that means for the children simply doesn’t matter. Nothing that comes from the sexual revolution can really be bad for anyone. Get used to it.

Isn’t this the insane world we see taking shape before our eyes? There may have been a lot wrong with marriage and the status of women in the America of young Mrs Adrienne Conrad (Rich’s married name), but cutting sex adrift from babies and marriage was patently not the solution. It has made nonsense of the body and made men and women strangers to themselves.

December 22, 2011

Pretty vs Hot

This post is intended as a lament of sorts, a lament for something in the culture that is dying and may never been seen again.
Pretty, pretty is dying.

People will define pretty differently. For the purposes of this piece, I define pretty as a mutually enriching balanced combination of beauty and projected innocence.
--
By nature, generally when men see this combination in women it brings out their better qualities, their best in fact. That special combination of beauty and innocence, the pretty inspires men to protect and defend it.

Young women today do not seem to aspire to pretty, they prefer to be regarded as hot. Hotness is something altogether different. When women want to be hot instead of pretty, they must view themselves in a certain way and consequently men view them differently as well
--
Most girls don’t want to be pretty anymore even if they understand what it is. It is ironic that 40 years of women’s liberation has succeeded only in turning women into a commodity. Something to be used up and thrown out.

"I was avoiding my dad's eyes as I waited with him at the end of the aisle.'

I was avoiding my dad's eyes as I waited with him at the end of the aisle. I did not want to hear any "pearls of wisdom." Instead I paid attention to the photographer. I simply could not look at my dad because I knew I was making a mistake.
--
Why would smart women do this? They cited many of the same reasons:

• Age: The self-imposed biological clock is starting to tick a little louder.
• "Marriage will instantly make the relationship better."
• "It's my last chance to get married and no one else will come along."
• "If it doesn't work out I can always get a divorce."

Judgment aside, "these women" are your sisters, daughters, and friends. Maybe even you. Their common --yet misguided--belief is that they are better off with the wrong guy than being alone. It doesn't matter how self-actualized, independent or liberal-minded they are.

"Girls in particular believe they are a 'commodity they must sell to other people' on Facebook.

Facebook and Twitter have created a generation obsessed with themselves, who have short attention spans and a childlike desire for constant feedback on their lives, a top scientist believes.

Repeated exposure to social networking sites leaves users with an 'identity crisis', wanting attention in the manner of a toddler saying: 'Look at me, Mummy, I've done this.'

Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, believes the growth of internet 'friendships' – as well as greater use of computer games – could effectively 'rewire' the brain.

This can result in reduced concentration, a need for instant gratification and poor non-verbal skills, such as the ability to make eye contact during conversations.
--
Her views were echoed by Sue Palmer, a literacy expert and author, who said girls in particular believe they are a 'commodity they must sell to other people' on Facebook.

She said: 'People used to have a portrait painted but now we can more or less design our own picture online. It's like being the star of your own reality TV show that you create and put out to the world.'

How chilling is this, "Girls in particular believe they are a 'commodity they must sell to other people' on Facebook."

June 11, 2011

Stocking up on light bulbs

When I learned that the new LED 100 watt lightbulbs would cost $50 each, I fell back to buying the $2.39 GE four-pack 100 watt incandescent bulbs and storing them in my basement. The ban on 100 watt bulbs has already begun in California and will come to the rest of the country on January 1, 2012.

What the government is ordering you to buy - flourescent light bulbs - contain hazardous materials that, if broken, threaten you and your family. Not only that, but the government ordered bulbs are less illuminating and give some people headaches - like my Zsu-Zsu who gets terrible migraines from flourescents.

--
What happens if you drop one on the floor and break it?

Fluorescent lights also carry their own environmental risks because they contain small amounts of mercury and other toxic materials. The EPA website contains three pages of consumer directions about what to do if you break a CFL bulb in your home: "Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more. Shut off the central heating and air conditioning system. Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with a metal lid.''

Congressman Ted Poe of Texas has poked fun at these EPA guidelines by holding up a fluorescent bulb on the House floor asking: "If I dropped this, would we all have to evacuate the Capitol?" If fluorescent bulbs weren't all the rage among greens, the Consumer Product Safety Commission might ban them as a home health hazard.

Though sponsored largely by Democrats, the ban was a bipartisan effort. It never would have become law without support from Republican senators and the signature of President Bush.

“The entire discussion of ‘phaseout of least- efficient general service light bulbs’ has been at the industry’s initiative,” Kyle Pitsor, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association lobbyist told Bingaman’s committee in 2007 testimony. “This is not a case of manufacturers dragging their heels, but of leading the way. New standards-setting legislation is needed in order to further educate consumers on the benefits of energy-efficient products.”
---
“Even if you care nothing about individual freedom or aesthetic pleasure, this ham-handed approach wouldn’t pass muster in a classroom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. As pollution control, it’s horribly inefficient.”
--
The bulb ban makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expression of cultural sanctimony, with a little technophilia thrown in for added glamour, or as a roundabout way to transfer wealth from the general public to the few businesses with the know-how to produce the light bulbs consumers don’t really want to buy.
Or, of course, as both.

Yeah, and I have to say I’m deeply, deeply disappointed with CFL bulbs. I replaced pretty much every regular bulb in the house with CFLs, but they’ve been failing at about the same rate as ordinary long-life bulbs, despite the promises of multi-year service. And I can’t tell any difference in my electric bill. Plus, the Insta-Wife hates the light. I’ve had somewhat better luck with LED bulbs, of which I have a couple, but though the longevity is better, the light is still inferior.

The New York Times in Bulb In, Bulb Out explores the new LED development in Silicon Valley and the competition to win the L Prize, a government sponsored award meant to spur the development of replacements for Edison's bulb.

Later, the committee heard from a panel of experts, including Howard Brandston, a former professor at R.P.I.’s Lighting Research Center. Brandston’s résumé includes everything from theater work to illuminating the Statue of Liberty, but lately he has become the Paul Revere of the movement to save the light bulb, giving speeches to industry conferences and a Tea Party rally in front of the White House. In his testimony, he warned of potential problems with compact fluorescents, which contain trace amounts of mercury. “Some of the most knowledgeable people I know,” Brandston said, “have begun to stockpile a lifetime supply of incandescent lamps.”

Anyway, the whole project seemed absurd to him: why create a technological marvel just to reproduce the light we already have? When Brandston turned on the incandescent, he beamed with satisfaction at Edison’s warm and wasteful glow. “Look at that,” he said. “It’s a perfect thing.”

I'm with the Wall Street Journal in their declaration that Americans deserve their choice of illumination.

In classic doublespeak, the Department of Energy explains that outlawing incandescent bulbs will "empower consumers with lighting choices." Unless your choice is to buy the light bulb the government doesn't like. If Republicans can't understand the appeal of sparing Americans from the light bulb police, what are they good for?

"State-sanctioned child abuse" and the "happy cruelty" towards boys

In today's public schools, kids are inundated with sexual material. We're not talking sex education here, but sex saturation.
The debasement of children's minds through sex education was concocted about a hundred years ago by Germany's Frankfurt School. The socialists launched a cultural revolution to corrupt the West so badly that it would "stink," in their words. Some of their methods would be destroying the family, stripping parents of power, and forcing sex education into the schools.

Sex education has mutated from, in my day, animated films of sperms swimming toward eggs to an outright violation of children's innocence. Nine-year-olds learn to put condoms on bananas; middle school children squirm at talks about sex change operations. By high school, free condoms are in plentiful supply....

Somehow the safety issues always return to the gay, bi, or trans youth. Perhaps this is a way to control and intimidate the sexual majority; certainly, it forces more sex talk into the curriculum.

Regardless of how the left spins it, children being forced to listen to one uncomfortable, repellant sex talk after another, is not safety. It's also not education. It's actually a state-sanctioned form of child abuse.

And the boys. We've ignored the boys writes Anthony Esolen in Victims Unseen with particular reference to the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.

We have ignored the boys. And we ignored them, as we have been ignoring them, these many years. Governments and foundations shovel money into programs to teach math and science specifically to girls, but not a penny, not for any subject, devoted specifically to boys. Why is that? Nowadays in some places a boy growing up with a father is as rare as an orphan used to be. These boys need more than ever the male discipline of sports — so what do we do about it? We cut their rosters. Sometimes, against common sense, against plain decency and charity, we force the boys to play on the same teams with girls, even when there are girls’ teams available. Why that happy cruelty?...

Young men are strong enough and aggressive enough to commit — but also vulnerable enough to suffer — the bulk of violent crime in our country. Everyone knows the former; does anyone care to consider the latter? One in ten black men aged 20 to 30 is currently in prison. Do we sponsor any initiatives to reach the boys before they fall into that abyss? Boys are now far outnumbered by girls in college. Exactly how this state of affairs is to be a boon to the civilization, the country, the family, and the Church, no one has bothered to examine. I think it heralds the onset of catastrophe. But is there a single program anywhere designed to address the issue? Boys find school detestable — I found it so, and I have met few young men, even those I teach in college, and most especially the brightest, who say that they loved high school, and few young women who say they hated it. Does anyone care?

We will rue the consequences of the way children, boys and girls, are being educated today for generations.

May 11, 2011

"Terminal Male Idiocy"

Even the average man will shorten his life span like a Cro-Magnon. Compared to women, Mahalik finds, guys are less likely to wear sunscreen, take their pills, accept bed rest, administer self-exams, develop a network of emotional support, mix in some healthy food, or exercise safely. Alternatively, he is vastly more likely to snuff himself out by smoking and drinking, drinking and driving, drugging and sexing, committing suicide or getting killed, or dying in virtually every conceivable way except childbirth. The reason for all this "stupid stuff," says Mahalik, is men "don't want to be seen as pussies or wimps."

But can society change these ideas? ....Mahalik says, envisioning a campaign that raises awareness of terminal male idiocy the same way prior efforts have addressed anorexia in women.

All those new Men's Health Commissions springing up in states have to make good health be seen as manly.

April 13, 2011

The Sexual Cesspool that is Yale

You can pin much of this idiocy -- the Women's Center's no less than the frat guys' -- on the eternal foolishness of youth. The real blame falls on those who should have known better: the adults of Yale officialdom.

So, can school administrators find the spine to stand up to the agitators on their campuses and impose some standards of sexual decency? They'll face charges of censorship, especially at public schools, but they don't have to grant official imprimatur to hypersexual groups and activities or let them use college facilities. They needn't be puritans, just insist on the basic norms that govern life outside the academic bubble.

March 25, 2011

23 Sexes - A conspiracy of plumbers

In the beginning there was male and female. Soon there was homosexuality. Later there were lesbians, and much later gays, bisexuals, transgenders and queers....In an extraordinary document entitled Protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and sex and/or gender identity, the AHRC has come up with a further list of “genders” which they require us to recognize, and on whose behalf they want our federal government to pass anti-discrimination legislation. To date (by the time you read this, the AHRC's family of sexualities may have increased and multiplied) these are: transgender, trans, transsexual, intersex, androgynous, agender, cross dresser, drag king, drag queen, genderfluid, genderqueer, intergender, neutrois, pansexual, pan-gendered, third gender, third sex, sistergirl and brotherboy.

I can only conclude that this is a conspiracy of plumbers who must be salivating at the prospects of adding on and retrofitting all the public restrooms in Australia.

March 23, 2011

"Biology, like it or not, isn't fair"

In "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys," Kay Hymowitz explores the rise of the "child-man," a slovenly creature who spends his twenties (and, in some cases, his thirties and forties) in the grip of a prolonged adolescence. Hymowitz coins this new life phase "preadulthood," and while it applies to both sexes, "it doesn't tend to bring out the best in men."
--
"Manning Up" is a fun, thoughtful read, and an interesting one-Hymowitz weaves a history of gender roles, the post-industrial economy, and evolving pop culture into her often witty take on the battle of the sexes. The book concludes with a few broad assertions. First, biology, like it or not, isn't fair. Second, if you expect nothing of men, they'll likely deliver nothing, particularly in the realm of parenthood. Third, both men and women need to rethink our aggressively individualist culture in order to have meaningful lives together.
All true. But what, one is forced to ask, do we do about it? Hymowitz hints at it in her book, perhaps too polite to blaringly point it out. But a close read of "Manning Up" delivers two sizable implications, lurking under the surface like toothy barracudas: First, that women share a large amount of culpability in this whole mess. Second, the child-man, like it or not, is in part a product of women's behavior. To cure the child-man, women will have to change.
"Men may be jerks," my husband likes to occasionally declare, "but women are insane."

March 5, 2011

Gender Apartheid

On Friday, the United Nations rewarded Iran with membership on the UN's Commission on the Status of Women which is the principal global policy-making body dedicated exclusively to gender equality and the advancement of women.

December 28, 2010

Complementarity of Desire

And what is it that women most admire in a man? From decades of talking to women on the radio and, of course, from simply living life, I have concluded that an admirable man is one who has three qualities: strength, integrity, ambition.

All three are needed. Strength without integrity is machismo. Integrity without strength or without ambition makes a man a milquetoast. And ambition without integrity makes for a successful crook.

He concludes

The beauty of all this is that it all comes together for men, for women, and for society.

Women get what they want most: to be married to and loved by a man they admire. Men then attain what they want most: to be admired by the woman they love. And society gets the thing it most needs: admirable men.

"I needed counseling, not a sex-change operation"

When millionaire property developer Charles Kane steps out with his new fiancée, people tend to either stare or discreetly do a double take.

It may be because Victoria Emms is a striking redhead and, at 28 to Charles’s 50, is young enough to be his daughter.

But they both suspect it is because they look - to use their own words - ‘eccentric’ or ‘odd’.

In Victoria’s eyes, Charles is ‘all man’, but others may disagree. Born Sam Hashimi, the businessman and divorced father-of-two had a sex-change operation in 1987 to turn him into glamorous interior designer Samantha Kane.

Creating children to order

The children were fathered using sperm from a man who advertised in 'Gay Times'. The biological mother has accused the man of trying to marginalise her lesbian partner
--
Norman Wells, of the Family Education Trust, said: ‘This case raises a whole host of questions about the ethics of artificial insemination by donor. Just because we have the technology to do something doesn’t necessarily make it desirable or socially beneficial.

‘It is always a recipe for disaster to try to create children to order by artificial means to satisfy the desires of natural parents who are unrelated and lack a shared commitment to parenting.’

There will be a lot more court battles like this in our future. We are beginning to see the consequences of artificially conceiving children outside of a committed relationship.

For the children who result from such a loveless conception, it can be tragic.

October 4, 2010

Bad news about synthetic hormones

here are millions of cases of steroid use that occur daily with barely a second thought: Millions of women take birth control pills, blithely unaware that their effects may be subtly seeping into and modulating brain structure and activity.

It is a huge experiment whose resolution will not be known for a while, but a new study in the journal Brain Research demonstrates that the effects are likely to be dramatic. It found that birth control pills have structural effects on regions of the brain that govern higher-order cognitive activities, suggesting that a woman on birth control pills may literally not be herself -- or is herself, on steroids.
--
What happens, then, when the female brain gets a significant and artificial dose of steroid hormone, either progesterone, estrogen or both? We know what happens below the waist, the pregnancies prevented. What happens above the neck, as this steroidal tsunami washes over the neural coastline?

It appears that the brain, that sensitive organ replete with steroid receptors, reacts to its hormonal milieu with startling structural modifications

"An awful lot of breast cancer was caused by doctors' prescriptions," said Larry Norton of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

More and more evidence is revealing the disastrous effects of synthetic hormones in our water supply that has led to deformed wildlife and the alarming rise in male infertility. But, despite the evidence, there is almost total denial. The pill is sacrosanct, the sacred cow of the sexual revolution.

At age 7, about 10 percent of white girls and 23 percent of black girls had started developing breasts, compared to 5 percent of white girls and 15 percent of black girls in 1997, according to a study led by Dr. Frank Biro of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

At age 8, about 18 percent of white girls and 43 percent of black girls had entered puberty, compared to around 11 percent of white girls in 1997, but the same as black girls in that year.

Early puberty in girls is a concern because studies have shown they are more likely to develop breast and uterine cancer later - women who spend more of their lives menstruating have a higher risk of getting breast cancer.

Experts aren't sure what caused the earlier development of puberty.

But another study published Monday in Pediatrics shows that overweight girls are more likely to enter puberty earlier. The study was led by Dr. Mildred Maisonet from Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health and conducted on girls in Great Britain.

According to an investigation by Beijing's "Health Times" newspaper, laboratory tests on the children showed levels of estradiol, a female sex hormone, and another hormone, lactogen, were between three and seven times expected levels.

August 9, 2010

Men do more than their fair share, study shows

Catherine Hakim said: ‘We now have a much more specific and accurate portrait of how families and individuals divide their “work” and this data overturns the well-entrenched theory that women work disproportional long hours in jobs and at home in juggling family and work. Feminists constantly complain that men are not doing their fair share of domestic work. The reality is that most men already do more than their fair share.’

While men carry out substantially more hours of paid work, women will often choose to scale down their hours of paid employment to make time for household work when starting a family. In Britain, men are shown to actually work longer hours on average than women, as many will work overtime to boost family income when the children are at home while wives switch to part-time jobs or drop out of employment altogether.

Couples with no children at home and with both in full-time jobs emerge as the only group where women work more hours in total than men, once paid and unpaid work hours are added up.

Neil Lyndon, Feminism? Forget it, sistersThis is the first time I can remember in 40 years that an authoritative study on a key issue of so-called gender politics has come out with a self-evident truth that runs directly contrary to orthodox feminist ideology. The fact that it has been written and published by a woman makes it even more delightful.

Ever since the late Sixties, it has been an incontestable article of faith in the feminist creed that men are lazy, slobbish, barbaric, barely civilisable and incapable of switching on the vacuum cleaner without breaking it .
--

What next? Might a respectable study soon reveal that, contrary to what we are always told, one in four men does not batter the woman he lives with? Or that not all men are rapists? Might the entire edifice of lies that comprises modern feminism now be about to tumble?

July 29, 2010

Life in Burundi

If you ever wondered how real were the effects of culture on the lives of people, the Economist tells a powerful story in three paragraphs: A hard day's life

ON A chill windy morning in the mountains of Burundi, six women in an “empowerment group” run by an Atlanta-based charity, CARE, sit down under a tree to talk about their day. They have 49 living children between them. Their village, Dihetu, is nondescript, the soil average. The women grow cassava, beans and bananas.

Marie-José, aged 42, has ten children. She wakes up at six o’clock and cleans the hut. At half past six she makes tea for the children who go to school in the morning. She is in the fields from seven. At 11 she tends the goats. At noon she prepares lunch for the children who go to school in the afternoon. She is back in the fields from one o’clock. At four she fetches water. At five she gathers firewood. She is back home to cook dinner at six. At seven she washes the children from a bucket. The family eats at eight. Usually it is porridge or beans; they have meat once a year. Often Marie-José will forgo dinner to give her children more. At half past eight she prays. “I pray to God that at least we are alive. After prayer I feel joy.” At nine she goes to sleep.

As for the husbands, the few who find work as labourers leave home and rarely come back. Many of those who stay are drunks with syphilis. Women are forbidden to inherit land. They are often beaten and raped. “My husband gets up at eight,” says Albertina. “He takes a bath and goes to the bar. He stays there drinking banana beer until midday, then comes home to eat. In the afternoon he goes back to the bar. He returns home for dinner. Then he takes a nap.

March 27, 2010

The male brain

Perhaps the biggest difference between the male and female brain is that men have a sexual pursuit area that is 2.5 times larger than the one in the female brain. Not only that, but beginning in their teens, they produce 20 to 25-fold more testosterone than they did during pre-adolescence.

If testosterone were beer, a 9-year-old boy would be getting the equivalent of a cup a day. But a 15-year-old would be getting the equivalent of nearly two gallons a day. This fuels their sexual engines and makes it impossible for them to stop thinking about female body parts and sex.

And so begins the 'Man Trance'--
The 'Doting Daddy Brain'A man in hot pursuit of a mate doesn't even remotely resemble a devoted, doting daddy. But that's what his future holds. When his mate becomes pregnant, she'll emit pheromones that will waft into his nostrils, stimulating his brain to make more of a hormone called prolactin. Her pheromones will also cause his testosterone production to drop by 30 percent.

His emotions run deepAlthough men have earned the reputation for being more stoic than women, they actually have stronger emotional reactions than we do. They just don't show it very often.
--

'Lovable Grandpas' and 'Grumpy Old Men'As men age, the male brain hormones change and the male brain and body goes into the stage of life called andropause. The king of male hormones -- testosterone -- goes down and the queen of female hormones -- estrogen -- goes up. Whether Grandpa is your kids' hero or the grouch they hate to visit depends a lot on how he handles these hormonal changes.

Not only is the mature male brain more receptive to closer bonds, but it's also more sensitive to loneliness. Nobody thrives when they're lonely, but it seems to take a major toll on older men. Sixty percent of divorces in couples over the age of 50 are initiated by women, leaving their husbands shell-shocked and devastated.

March 6, 2010

Gendercide

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

December 11, 2009

What you didn't know about testosterone

It is popularly known as the selfish hormone, which courses through male veins to promote egotistical and antisocial behaviour. Yet research has suggested that testosterone’s bad reputation is largely undeserved.

Far from always increasing aggression and greed, the male hormone can actually encourage decency and fair play, scientists have discovered.
--
The findings, from an Anglo-Swiss team, suggest that rather than encouraging selfishness and risk-taking as a matter of course, testosterone has subtler effects on human behaviour that depend very much on social circumstances.

November 2, 2009

"Once, long ago, I was held captive in Kabul, Afghanistan."

Yes, I went there of my own free will, but I was only 20 years old and in love with my college sweetheart
--
If one survives such a grand and dangerous adventure, one learns some important lessons.

--
Thus, at too young an age, I already understood that barbarism and hatred of the Other is indigenous to Islam; it is not caused by Western “evil.” Intra-tribal and religious-sect feuding is a permanent way of life in the wild, wild East.
--
I could never get anyone in the American civil rights, anti-war, feminist, or post-colonialist movements to understand this. They needed to blame the Big Bad West for the world’s problems. They also needed to identify the developing world as intrinsically innocent, pure, victimized.
--
My people: Western feminists, leftists, gay liberationists, progressives, absolutely refuse to stand up to Islam’s subordination and bestial persecution of women, dissidents, and homosexuals. The same activists who easily condemn Christianity and Judaism as “misogynists” are hushed about Islamic misogyny in practice.
-
Now I and a handful of others are trying to tell the truth about Islamic gender apartheid. Those of us who are raising the alarm are being demonized as “Islamophobes,” “racists,” and “fascists.” Yet, in my opinion, western civilization, beginning with Europe, will be won or lost on the issue of women’s rights.

Gender-bending chemicals

two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, nappies, sunscreen lotion and moisturising cream.

--
Sperm counts are falling so fast that young men are less fertile than their fathers and produce only a third as much, proportionately, as hamsters. And gender-bending chemicals are increasingly being blamed for the mystery of the "lost boys": babies who should normally be male who have been born as girls instead.
--
The results build on earlier studies showing that British children have higher levels of gender-bending chemicals in their blood than their parents or grandparents.

October 26, 2009

"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"

The social consequences of unwed mothers are long-lasting and heart-breaking.

Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"

In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."

Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.

It's not about race though that is what school administrators and community activists focus on. There's plenty of money for schools.

"The real problem," says Glenn Hopkins, president of Alexandria's Hopkins House, which provides preschool and other services to low-income families, "is that school superintendents don't realize -- or won't admit -- that the education gap is symptomatic of a social gap."

Hopkins notes that student achievement is deeply affected by issues of family, income and class, things superintendents have little control over.

1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn't be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income--and disproportionately black--phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal--one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

Until black leaders come to grips with what is really happening in the inner cities, the plight of black males and black females will only get worse.

Too many young girls may yearn for marriage, but making babies is something they can do, something they believe they must do if they want meaning in their lives. Misbegotten health policies are not teaching young girls that they are too young to start families, but giving them contraceptives without parental consent and essentially saying do what you want.

October 7, 2009

The dearth of manly men

The Pill may also have changed women's taste in men, according to a study.

Scientists say the hormones in the oral contraceptive suppress a woman's interest in masculine men and make boyish men more attractive. Although the change occurs for just a few days each month, it may have been highly influential since use of the Pill began more than 40 years ago.
--
If the theory is right, it could partly explain the shifting in tastes from macho 1950s and 1960s stars such as Kirk Douglas and Sean Connery to the more wimpy, androgynous stars of today, such as Johnny Depp and Russell Brand.

Dr Alexandra Alvergne, of the University of Sheffield, says the Pill could also be altering the way women pick their mates and could have long-term implications for society.
--

Scientists have long known that a woman's taste in men changes over her menstrual cycle.
During the few days each month when women are fertile - around the time of ovulation - they tend to prefer masculine features and men who are more assertive.
--
On days when women are not fertile, their tastes swing towards more feminine, boyish faces and more caring personalities, researchers have shown.

However, if women are taking the Pill they no longer have fertile days. That means they no longer experience the hormonal changes that make them more attracted to masculine men and those with dissimilar genetic make-up.

Or maybe the dearth of manly men can be laid to something in the water.

It’s “the first thing that I’ve seen as a scientist that really scared me,” said then 59-year-old University of Colorado biologist John Woodling, speaking to the Denver Post in 2005.

They studied the fish and decided the main culprits were estrogens and other steroid hormones from birth control pills and patches, excreted in urine into the city’s sewage system and then into the creek.

Woodling, University of Colorado physiology professor David Norris, and their EPA-study team were among the first scientists in the country to learn that a slurry of hormones, antibiotics, caffeine and steroids is coursing down the nation’s waterways, threatening fish and contaminating drinking water.

September 19, 2009

"Hot food not sex"

We are the “cooking ape”, according to Richard Wrangham, a noted British anthropologist and primatologist at Harvard University. The unrivalled success of the human species is down to our mastery of flame and our use of it to transform raw food into cooked. Ours is a species built on hot dinners, not cold plants and berries. ..

“I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals,” Wrangham explains in his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. “Cooking increased the (calorific) value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time and our social lives.” He argues, as no one else has done before, that cooking was pivotal in our evolution.
--
Cultural, historical and culinary clues point to the plausibility of Wrangham’s intuition. There is no society on Earth that does not cook; not a single people exists on raw food alone.

--
“I couldn’t believe that nobody had thought about the energetic significance of cooked food [cooking releases locked-in calories by breaking down molecular structures in plants and meat; without cooking, some material passes straight through].
--
Cooking would have made a radical difference to the creatures who mastered it: it made plants and meat more calorie-dense; it spared our ancestors from the marathons of mastication required with raw foods (wild chimps spend up to five hours a day gathering food and chewing it); it was easier on the gut. It is utterly within the bounds of belief that the first hominid to put a flame to his food started an extraordinary chain of evolutionary events that culminated in us, the ape in the kitchen.
--

Human beings are unique in that when we cook, we do it to feed others as well as ourselves (other apes, even those who pair-bond, forage for themselves and don’t share). And in almost all societies it’s women who tend the stove. Having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered food will not be stolen, while having a wife means a man will have an evening meal.

To some, though, this train of thought — that the way to a man’s heart really is through his evolutionarily shrunken stomach — is even more heretical than the idea that we are the cooking ape. “People don’t like it because over the past decades we have understood that our social system comes through the competition for reproductive partners. I’m saying, pair bonds are firstly about food, and that gave a platform to develop those relationships further.”

June 3, 2009

"We men don’t have the semblance of a clue"

I was in the middle of treatment for an aggressive case of prostate cancer last winter, and it included a six-month course of hormone therapy. My Lupron shots suppressed testosterone, which is the fuel for prostate cancer.

When your testosterone is being throttled, there are bound to be side effects. So, with the help of Lupron, I spent a few months aboard the Good Ship Menopause with all the physical baggage that entails. It’s a trip that most men don’t expect to take.
--
When it comes to hot flashes, ladies, I salute you. After my brief dalliance with that hormonal phenomenon, it seems to me it’s an under-reported condition.
--
Hand in hand with the hot flashes came the food cravings...Then there was the weight issue...And I hated it, hated it, hated it.
--
When I wasn’t devouring a king-size Italian sub or smoldering from a hot flash, it seemed that I was crying...Not only was I temporarily menopausal, but it appeared that I was also turning into a teenage girl from the early 1970s.
-
t did confirm my lifelong sense that the world of women is hormonal and mysterious, and that we men don’t have the semblance of a clue.

May 27, 2009

Declining female happiness

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.

So, women started becoming less happy in about 1975, just about the time when modern feminism came into full force.

"I want love and children but they are nowhere to be seen."

A playwright who embraced the feminism espoused by her mother and flaunted by Madonna now feels betrayed.

My mother was a hippy who kept a pile of (dusty) books by Germaine Greer and Erica Jong by her bed (like every good feminist, she didn't see why she should do all the cleaning). She imbued me with the great values of choice, equality and sexual liberation. I fought with my older brother and won; at university I beat the rugby lads at drinking games. I was not to be messed with.

Now, nearly 37, those same values leave me feeling cold. I want love and children but they are nowhere to be seen.
--
I wish a more balanced view of womanhood had been available to me. I wish that being a housewife or a mother wasn't such a toxic idea to middle-class liberals of yesteryear.

Increasing numbers of my feminist friends are giving up their careers for love and children and baking. I wish I'd had kids ten years ago, when time was on my side, but the problem is not so much time as mentality. I made a conscious decision not to have serious relationships because I thought I had all the time in the world. Many of my friends did the same. It's about understanding what is important in life, and from what I see and feel, loving relationships and children bring more happiness than work ever can.

January 28, 2009

The Sacrosanct Pill

According to the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, an alarming rise in male infertility in developed nations is possibly caused by the quantities of synthetic female hormones, particularly estrogen, in the food chain and water. These quantities are directly attributable to increased use of the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy.
--
Indeed, according to Canberra Hospital professor Peter Collignon, an opponent of recycling sewage water into the potable supply, estrogen can be more of a problem in recycled water than microbes because it cannot be filtered out and we simply do not know how well it breaks down. Just as the Romans drinking from lead cups unwittingly caused infertility in themselves, perhaps we are seeing after 30 years of contraceptive pill use the long-term effects of introducing artificial estrogen into our wider environment. So you see this is not just a preoccupation of the misogynistic old Vatican.

__
The evidence that synthetic hormones can have grotesque environmental effects has actually been around for a long time and it is mounting. As long ago as the 1980s, studies were done in the US which showed the effects of estrogen pollution on wildlife, famously alligators in Florida with deformed genitals.
--
There are so many reasons for being wary of the contraceptive pill. Why are we not questioning its prevalence?

The reason is, of course, that it is the sacred cow of the sexual revolution. One imaginative letter writer claimed the Catholic view of the pill was that it was "the great Satan", and actually that is not a bad description. It was marketed as an instrument of sexual freedom, and it has provided that, particularly for men. But one might ask if for women it has been the means of sexual liberation or just a way of turning us into empty vessels for sex? Is it like the sexual revolution itself: a pretty and alluring package that turns out to be - for both sexes - like a series of empty boxes, one inside the other. At the end, there is nothing but an empty box.

It's astonishing when you think of it. If there were any other cause for worldwide male infertility and environmental degradation, people would be up in arms.

"The Basic Male Tool Kit is Under Threat"

Evolution is being distorted by pollution, which damages genitals and the ability to father offspring, says new study.

The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.

The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.
--

It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.

"This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat,"
--
Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" – or gender-benders – because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.

The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than 250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.

It concludes: "Males of species from each of the main classes of vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment. "Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence.

September 10, 2008

Paglia on Palin

Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy -- one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama's triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football -- or one of the great light-saber duels in "Star Wars."...This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

September 2, 2008

Failure to Launch

Tony Dokoupil, 28, engaged to be married, examines the 20 something scene and reads the new book Guyland by the sociologist Michael Kimmel.

the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from "a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life." In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.
--
he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it's more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility.

Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile—and endlessly adolescent—generation of men in U.S. history. They're also among the most distraught—men between the ages of 16 and 26 have the highest suicide rate for any group except men above 70—and socially isolated, despite their image as a band of backslapping buddies.
--
The happy family man, on the other hand, is an alien concept in Guyland, and all too scarce in popular culture. Men like me, who actually embrace married life in their 20s, are seen as aberrations—or just a bit odd.

What came to my mind was Kathleen Parker whose book Save the Males is causing a furor.

From the London Times, Where have all the real men gone?The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills. Males as a group – not random men – are bad by virtue of their DNA.

While women have been cast as victims, martyrs, mystics or saints, men have quietly retreated into their caves.
--
NOTHING quite says “Men need not apply” like a phial of mail-order sperm and a turkey-baster. In the high-tech nursery of sperm donation and self-insemination – and in the absence of shame attached to unwed motherhood – babies can now be custom-ordered without the muss and fuss of human intimacy.
--
By elevating single motherhood from an unfortunate consequence of poor planning to a sophisticated act of self-fulfilment, we have helped to fashion a world in which fathers are not just scarce but in which men are also superfluous.
--

As luck would have it, a Cub Scout’s father was semi-retired or between jobs or something – we didn’t ask – and could attend the meetings. He didn’t have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapours into the atmosphere.

His presence shifted the tectonic plates and changed the angle of the Earth on its axis. Our boys were at his command, ready to disarm landmines, to sink enemy ships – or even to sit quietly for the sake of the unit if he of the gravelly voice and sandpaper face wished it so...

But, of course, boys don’t stay Cub Scouts for long. We’ve managed over the past 20 years or so to create a new generation of child-men, perpetual adolescents who see no point in growing up. By indulging every appetite instead of recognising the importance of self-control and commitment, we’ve ratified the id.

In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.

Unprogressive though it sounds, the world in which we live requires no less.

August 18, 2008

Time for Maintenance

The biggest chunk of that time – up to half an hour – is spent showering, washing and styling their hair, followed by 20 minutes applying make-up and 15 minutes polishing finger and toe nails.
---
“There’s a host of waxing, exfoliating, moisturising, straightening, polishing and plucking involved

July 14, 2008

Unhappy women

By almost any economic or social indicator, the last 35 years have been great for women. Birth control has given them the ability to control reproduction. They are obtaining far more education and making inroads in many professions that were traditionally male-dominated. The gender wage gap has declined substantially. Women are living longer then ever. Studies even suggest that men are starting to take on more housework and child-raising responsibilities.

Given all these changes, the evidence presented by Stevenson and Wolfers is striking: women report being less happy today than they were 35 years ago, especially relative to the corresponding happiness rates for men. This is true of working women and stay-at-home moms, married women and those that are single, the highly educated and the less educated. It is worse for older women; those aged 18-29 don’t seem to be doing too badly. Women with kids have fared worse than women without kids. The only notable exception to the pattern is black women, who are happier today than they were three decades ago.

Just a tidbit
we must stop seeing everything in life through the narrow lens of gender. If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom comes personal responsibility.

The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. "We're proud to help the mothers stay in school," says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.

Clearly access to contraception will do nothing to prevent young girls who want to become pregnant.

But the story could have one upside: it might expose the folly of much of what has passed for wisdom about teen pregnancy. I say might because so far the media seems to be having trouble grasping what happened in this old, largely Catholic fishing town.
--
übersocialized middle-class experts, journalists, and policy makers aren’t addressing the fact that girls tend to like babies. In most cultures in human history, 15- or 16-year-olds were seen as viable mothers (only after being married off, of course), so biological urge coincided with social need.
--
In the past, the problem was held at bay by a combination of sexual reticence, social disapproval, and a no-baby-without-marriage rule, since it wasn’t easy to find a presentable boy ready to sign on to a life sentence at 16. No more. Sexual reticence is now deemed something on the order of a Victorian perversion. Social disapproval? Nowhere evident. The Gloucester school’s superintendent found that most townspeople greeted with a yawn the news that local teen pregnancy rates were soaring,
--
Then there’s the point compellingly made by Kathleen Parker in her new book Save the Males: Americans aren’t all that keen on fathers these days. A girl eyeing her cousin’s cute little baby girl used to believe that she had to find a husband before she could have one of her own. Now, she can bypass the husband problem and just spend a little leisure time with the homeless guy on Main Street. Who cares if Dad is an addict or a tramp? They’re all bums—or jerks—anyway

What is so distressing is the poverty-stricken future that lies ahead for these girls and their children. The 'unmarriage' revolution that Kay Hymowitz writes of in her book does more to contribute to the growing inequality in America than anything else.

The increase in single mothers raising children is not just a problem in Gloucester. Intact families with mothers and fathers raising children is the most important element in a sound society with a hopeful future for all. Sadly, it's the least educated girls, thirsting to be loved, who become prey for older, unscrupulous males, seduced into believing that sex equals love.

The battle to point to an alternative way of living -
sexual self-control, resilience against passing temptations, better avenues of communication, a wider range of interests, and, ultimately, the ability to make a complete gift of self to another in marriage -
is being lost when the ACLU and Planned Parenthood have teamed up
in an aggressive campaign over the past several years—a campaign to pressure states to eliminate abstinence education and to reject federal funding for these programs. .... The goal is to get enough states to refuse the federal abstinence-education funding to the point where the ACLU and Planned Parenthood can convince Congress to eliminate such funding entirely.

All this is happening, by the way, as fresh reports arrive almost every month about the benefits of teen abstinence and the effectiveness of abstinence programs.

June 23, 2008

When a Man Cries

When a man cries, everyone pays attention.

The rarity of male tears lends to them true potency. When a man sheds tears, particularly in the public eye, people sit up and take notice. We know something truly consequential is occurring.
The 15 Greatest Man Cries from the Art of Manliness along with the 10 times When Is It Okay for a Man to Cry.

7. Visiting sites that pay tribute to those who laid down their lives for others. Whether running your fingers over the names at the Vietnam War Memorial or watching the oil leak from the sunk USS Arizona, contemplating the sacrifices made by your fellowman should make you tear up.

Maybe, having been disillusioned by the hatred and duplicity all around him, RFK was struck by a strange mood of wistfulness. He inserts this strange monologue into his narrative seemingly out of the blue.

Having been out of the United States for more than two months at this time of writing, I notice myself more and more conscious of the great heritage and birthright to which we as United States citizens are heirs and which we have the duty to preserve. A force motivating my writing this paper is that I believe we have failed in this duty or are in great jeopardy of doing so. The failure is due chiefly to our inability to get the true facts of the policy in which we are partners in Palestine.
It was a time before the incessant din of propaganda has since convinced Americans that evil was exclusively Made in the USA. History that is ostensibly written to enlighten is often in practice written to deceive. The most common use of history is to make us misremember the past. What we believe happened, as well as what we believed about RFK may have nothing to do with how things were. Reading his contemporaneous reports is like visiting a country we never knew existed and meeting a man who died twice; once at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan and again by the knife of popular culture. Twenty years after Kennedy left Palestine, Palestine came to him in a Los Angeles hotel.

June 3, 2008

Voyaging Across Sexual Boundaries

Morris described her transformation from male to female in two autobiographical works, Pleasures of a Tangled Life and The Conundrum.

She described how, as a man, he never felt homosexual but always regarded himself as 'wrongly equipped'.

Morris is also the author of Pax Britannica, a three part history of the rise and fall of the British Empire, which she started writing as a man and concluded when she was a woman.

Other works include portraits of cities including Oxford, Venice and New York.

Elizabeth said yesterday: 'I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them.

'We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce.

'So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.'
--

The couple have already planned to be buried on a small island on the River Dwyfor behind their house, with the inscription on the headstone to read: 'Here are two friends, at the end of one life.'

I read Conondrum when it was first published and all the rage. Morris described her voyages across sexual boundaries in the same beautiful and haunting way she wrote about the cities she visited and lived in around the world. She's an admirable woman and I'm delighted that she was with her true love for 59 years.

Mr. Day relayed to me one of the stories Americans should hear. It involves what happened to him after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war. When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, "I told you I would make you a cripple."

The break was designed to shatter Mr. Day's will. He had survived in prison on the hope that one day he would return to the United States and be able to fly again. To kill that hope, the Vietnamese left part of a bone sticking out of his arm, and put him in a misshapen cast. This was done so that the arm would heal at "a goofy angle," as Mr. Day explained. Had it done so, he never would have flown again.

But it didn't heal that way because of John McCain. Risking severe punishment, Messrs. McCain and Day collected pieces of bamboo in the prison courtyard to use as a splint. Mr. McCain put Mr. Day on the floor of their cell and, using his foot, jerked the broken bone into place. Then, using strips from the bandage on his own wounded leg and the bamboo, he put Mr. Day's splint in place.

Years later, Air Force surgeons examined Mr. Day and complimented the treatment he'd gotten from his captors. Mr. Day corrected them. It was Dr. McCain who deserved the credit. Mr. Day went on to fly again.

April 4, 2008

Gender Confusion

Thomas Beatie says (s)he has a very stable male identity, but (s)he appears to be a hopelessly confused woman who was artificially inseminated with sperm purchased from a sperm bank.

The proof - (s)he's pregnant.

Men don't get pregnant. This is not a news flash.

(S)he is not a man, despite an operation to remove her breasts and doses of testosterone to grow facial hair. (S)he harbored a desire to have a baby, so (s)he didn't have her reproductive organs removed.

In Oregon, (s)he registered as a man, the state accepted that change and recognized her marriage to another woman.

Their decision to go public, I suspect, may have much to do with wanting to get a contract to write a book and now that they have been on Oprah who is collaborating with People magazine, a contract I'm sure is in the offing.

The sexes and their roles in propagating the species haven't changed; it's just that some people doing it have gotten more odd. Medical technology can do all sorts of wonders to help people solidify their gender confusion, but it can't change reality and the basic laws of nature.

Now people may be willing to call her a 'man' because (s)he insists on it, but (s)he isn't and nothing (s)he says will change that. (S)he's a freak of nature.

I feel sorry for the poor baby born to this couple.

If you want to see more pictures of the "pregnant man" who told Oprah (s)he feared her baby would be killed, click here.

March 26, 2008

"Only a third of men feel they can speak freely"

Many men believe the world is now dominated by women and that they have lost their role in society, fuelling feelings of depression and being undervalued

What they appear to want is a return to manliness. They feel handcuffed by political correctness with
only a third of men surveyed feel they can speak freely and say what they think. Two-thirds find it safer to conceal their opinions.

March 8, 2008

More men not interested in sex

And in France where women have become sexual predators,
one-in-five French men aged between 18 and 24 "manifests no interest in sexuality", while abstinence rates for men under 35 was twice as high as for women.

For those men with normal urges and desires, they can get more if they do housework!

February 14, 2008

The Man I Love

On this Valentine's Day, the New York Times has an article that says the way married couples can keep love fresh and romance alive is to Reinvent Date Night by finding new ways and different activities they both enjoy ad in so doing inject novelty into the relationship and by so doing recreate some of the chemical surges of early courtship.

February 9, 2008

Why to settle for Mr. Good Enough

ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.
--
My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go

Smell, Algorithms or China

One of the most primal of those desires is that a possible partner smells right
-
Scent not only tells males which females are primed to conceive, but it also lets both sexes narrow their choices of potential partners. Among the constellation of genes that control the immune system are those known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which influence tissue rejection. Conceive a child with a person whose MHC is too similar to your own, and the risk increases that the womb will expel the fetus. Find a partner with sufficiently different MHC, and you're likelier to carry a baby to term.
--
Saliva also contains the compound, a fact that Haselton believes may partly explain the custom of kissing... "Kissing," she says simply, "might be a taste test."

One thing that throws us off the scent is the birth-control pill. Women who are on the Pill--which chemically simulates pregnancy--tend to choose wrong in the T-shirt test. When they discontinue the daily hormone dose, the protective smell mechanism kicks back in. "A colleague of mine wonders if the Pill may contribute to divorce," says Wysocki. "Women pick a husband when they're on birth control, then quit to have a baby and realize they've made a mistake."

As the matchmakers compete for customers — and denigrate each other’s methodology — the battle has intrigued academic researchers who study the mating game. On the one hand, they are skeptical, because the algorithms and the results have not been published for peer review. But they also realize that these online companies give scientists a remarkable opportunity to gather enormous amounts of data and test their theories in the field. EHarmony says more than 19 million people have filled out its questionnaire.

At 46, I had been burned to ash by divorce and had crawled back toward life, sometimes on hands and knees. The common wisdom is that people, in seeking love, risk losing themselves, but I did not fear this loss. And I thought that not choosing for myself might work better than choosing. I didn’t wonder about what my perfect person would be like. I was way beyond that kind of amusement.
--
Somebody must be looking out for us. A few years ago, my life was roadworthy but lonely — it cried out for an intervention. Now every day feels like a wild car ride with Zhong-Hua: lurching and unpredictable, but rich with humor, determination and devotion.

Passionless and Apathetic

Today's single young men hang out in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood writes Kay Hymowitz in Child-Man in the Promised Land.
Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”

But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men.
--

That’s too bad. Men are “more unfinished as people,” Kunkel has neatly observed. Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations. Adults don’t emerge. They’re made.

January 13, 2008

"The Today show, like life itself, unfolds while you’re doing other things"

It's always a treat to read Caitlin Flanagan piece and this month's piece in the Atlantic demonstrates why.

A Woman's Place, on Katie Couric's long day's journey into evening or why the Today show is more important than any nightly news program.

I watched them faithfully—although watch, I realize, is the wrong verb where this phenomenally successful program is concerned; anyone who fails to grasp this fact will never understand why the Today show will survive the death of nightly news, the death of the newspaper, and even the collapse of television as a major player in the media world. The Today show, like life itself, unfolds while you’re doing other things.
--
The Today show creates a bond with its overwhelmingly female viewers because so many of them watch it, as I did, during one of the most psychologically complex and lonely—and most emotionally fulfilling—times of their lives: their tenure as mothers to small children.
--

It is the loneliness of at-home motherhood—the loneliness for other adults, for the adult way of life, for the work clothes and schedules and employment itself—that makes the hosts of the Today show crucial. When you turn on the program, there they are: your friends. You half-listen to them, the way you half-listen to your children playing on the floor in the next room, and together the two worlds make up the whole of your enterprise: theory and practice. The host discusses shoes that are supposed to help toddlers walk more steadily, and you turn to your own baby and wonder if you ought to buy him a pair. ....
When it is on, the television screen is no longer a barrier separating real life from TV land; the television screen is a window into another room of the house, the one where the grown-ups are.

November 14, 2007

Females Joining the Hunt, Doom Follows

Of course, they were doomed, the Stone Age Feminists. You don't put women of fertile age in a position of being easily killed if you want your race of Neanderthals to survive.
The University of Arizona's Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, use archeological evidence ..argue that Neanderthal females - unlike Homo sapien women of the Upper Paleolithic period - joined men in hunts at a time when stabbing giant beasts with a sharpish stone affixed to a stick represented the cutting edge of technology.

"Putting the reproductive core of the population - pregnant women, mothers of infants, children themselves - at such danger could have put Neanderthals as a whole at serious demographic disadvantage," he said.

Homo sapiens, it appears, possessed the evolutionary advantage of keeping women away from the hunt.

From early days, human women appear to have sewed hide clothing, tended fires, and gathered vegetables rather than risking their lives on the hunt.

October 17, 2007

Young single girls rule

The Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle is showing up in unexpected places, with unintended consequences.

Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat.

Is this just the latest example of American cultural imperialism? Or is it the triumph of planetary feminism? Neither. The globalization of the SYF reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts that are pointing much of the world—with important exceptions, including Africa and most of the Middle East—toward a New Girl Order.
---
these trends—delayed marriage, expanded higher education and labor-force participation, urbanization—add a global media and some disposable income, and voilà: an international lifestyle is born.....and, everywhere, the frustrating hunt for a boyfriend and, though it’s an ever more vexing subject, a husband.

October 12, 2007

Culture Exploits Men

Culture exploits men. How could that possibly be?

Roy Baumeister was invited to address to the American Psychological Association. His speech Is There Anything Good About Men? is the best writing and thinking I've seen in years on the difference between the sexes.

A lot of excerpts.

“How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything?” ...The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men
Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards.

He sees the same pattern in genius and in mental retardation, more men at either end of the spectrum.

Men go to extremes more than women.

He says that the differences between the genders, even in the field of creativity are more about motivation than ability. What do they want to do and why? How many women do you find doing improvisational jazz?

He first looks at the biological motivation.

Did you know that the human population is descended from twice as many women as men? I didn't . Baumeister says, "This is the most unappreciated fact about gender."

throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
-
For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. ..We’re descended from women who played it safe.....For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. ... We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).
--In terms of the biological competition to produce offspring, then, men outnumbered women both among the losers and among the biggest winners. --Tradeoffs again: perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.

Then the social motivation.

Bausmeister says there are two different ways of being social. Women excel at close, intimate relationships while men excel at larger networks of shallower relationships and the network they have made. So in the larger social sphere and with strangers, men help more than women.

The conclusion is that men and women are both social but in different ways. Women specialize in the narrow sphere of intimate relationships. Men specialize in the larger group. If you make a list of activities that are done in large groups, you are likely to have a list of things that men do and enjoy more than women: team sports, politics, large corporations, economic networks, and so forth.

He goes to say that personality differences in communication, the notion of fairness, the "communal-exchange" difference and the competition-collaborative difference follow from this basic difference in the kind of social relationship that interests men and women.

The male pattern is suited for the large groups, the female pattern is best suited to intimate pairs

Finally culture.

Culture, he says, is a new and improved way of being social, a larger system, even a biological strategy with men and women working together, but against other groups of men and women. Culture mainly arose in the types of social relationships favored by men.

The women’s sphere consisted of women and therefore was organized on the basis of the kind of close, intimate, supportive one-on-one relationships that women favor. These are vital, satisfying relationships that contribute vitally to health and survival. Meanwhile the men favored the larger networks of shallower relationships. These are less satisfying and nurturing and so forth, but they do form a more fertile basis for the emergence of culture.

So how does culture use men, what are men good for? Three things.

1. Culture relies on men to create large social structures.
2. Culture uses men for the high-risk, high-payoff undertakings where a significant portion will suffer bad outcomes, waste their time, maybe even get killed.

most cultures have promoted population growth. And that depends on women. To maximize reproduction, a culture needs all the wombs it can get, but a few penises can do the job...men create the kind of social networks where individuals are replaceable and expendable. Women favor the kind of relationships in which each person is precious and cannot truly be replaced.

3, Culture requires that manhood be earned. A man must prove himself, earn respect, and produce more than he consumes, to support himself and others

While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks of shallow relationships, less necessary for survival but eventually enabling culture to flourish. The gradual creation of wealth, knowledge, and power in the men’s sphere was the source of gender inequality.

August 10, 2007

Your Brain on Love

But passionate love is something far stronger than that first sizzle of chemistry. "It's a drive to win life's greatest prize, the right mating partner," Fisher says. It is also, she adds, an addiction.

People in the early throes of passionate love, she says, can think of little else. They describe sleeplessness, loss of appetite, feelings of euphoria, and they're willing to take exceptional risks for the loved one.

Brain areas governing reward, craving, obsession, recklessness and habit all play their part in the trickery.

--
"It takes not will power but painful experience to make us wise."

Somehow, it all comes together, for better or for worse, the sum total of what's found in the mating dance of the ancient reptilian brain, the passion of the limbic brain and the logic of the neocortex.

April 14, 2007

Women and Children First

Come Sunday it will be ninety-five years since that great ship the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. A stunning statistic from the calamity reveals the ethos of the day: While seventy-four percent of the female passengers survived, eighty percent of the men aboard the tragic luxury liner perished. The rule for the lifeboats: women and children first.

Women and children first are indicative of a belief and hope in the future. It's keeping young life and the possibility of more life alive.

Women and children first bespeaks a higher consciousness, one nurtured by the great legacy of western civilization, itself a product of Judeo-Christian religious thought evolved over centuries.

It seems to me we are in danger of losing what was so hard-won, the chivalry about which John Stuart Mill said

“Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race, as a remarkable instance of a concerted and organized attempt by a most disorganized and distracted society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions; so much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which has left a most sensible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of all subsequent times.

We are losing the sense of women and children first in the interests of "gender equality".

Chivalry was once the foundation of the male code of ethics. What is a man is supposed to be these days? How do you transform testosterone and male strength into something other than violent aggression and sexual aggression, in its milder forms, bullying, meanness and contempt for women except as sexual objects?

Maybe we need Chivalry now. Dean Jacques thinks so. He writes about Modern Chivalry and sees Chivalry Now as a way for men to reclaim their souls. Think of Chivalry-Now is a the counterpoint to the feminism movement.a philosophical partner that heals the wounds of the male gender, just as feminism heals the wounds of women.
--
Chivalry-Now provides a voice that speaks to the inner needs of men to help them comply with a world that has changed significantly in the last hundred years. It gives them a place of value in society, because it focuses on truth and courage, honor and compassion, along with healthy, more courteous relationships with women, and with men for that matter.

We don't need another distraction from doing what we have to do. As a society, it's time we grow up. We have to take away the glamour of doing what is wrong. We have to stop rewarding anti-social behavior. We have to develop a culture that is more humane. We have to start with the choices we make every day, and not allow ourselves to be distracted from the truth. We need the moral integrity to withdraw our support, no matter how passive, of what is wrong.

So many men and boys are yearning for something more, something that validates their very maleness. Seems to me, nothing tops chivalry and the bravery of women and children first.

You can point to the cultural preference for males to secure a heir, the cost of raising a daughter who will eventually belong to her husband's family, and the very expensive cost of a dowry.

Yet, before ultrasound allowed the prenatal determination of sex, abortions were rare.

We are beginning to see the social costs of skewed gender ratios in China where the one-child policy has resulted in an estimated 40 million bachelors who can not find wives. It's not pretty.

One Chinese official said in Facing the Future with 40 million bachelors
China faces a future of crime and instability as a generation of 40 million men is left frustrated by a lack of brides, thanks to the practice of selective abortion of female foetuses, a population official has warned.

Men left on the shelf would resort to prostitutes or pay huge prices for brides, while trafficking in women and girls kidnapped from rural areas and other countries would increase.
--

"Such serious gender disproportion poses a major threat to the healthy, harmonious and sustainable growth of the nation's population and would trigger such crimes and social problems as mercenary marriage, abduction of women and prostitution."

A UN official said the shortage of woman is creating a "huge societal issue", one of the three biggest challenges facing China along with HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation.

Young males who can't find wives are "low status" and prone to improve their situation through violent and criminal behavior.
The growing crime rate in China which is being linked to China's massive "floating" or transient population, some 80 million of which are low-status males

China is beginning to promote the Girl Care Project while India plans to set up a series of orphanages to raise unwanted baby girls.

Here in America, our culture has profoundly changed in the past 25 years. The psychoanalyst Shrinkwrapped writes about the psychic costs on individuals and society in Reverberations and Vicissitudes of Abortion.

Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 Mothers and Fathers: When Does Life Begin?
Part 3 Children of Choice
The idea that your parents have parents decided to abort a potential sibling is a significant issue, made more so when done in a perfunctory manner as a matter of course. Such a "choice" unavoidably conveys the message that a child’s life is hostage to the parent’s desires.
--
Children who experience themselves as commodities whose existence serves the needs of others, have a natural tendency to treat themselves and others as mere "need satisfying objects."

To realize just how far we've come, read Katherine in the comments to Part 3.

February 14, 2007

To Hell with Love

"Love is constant effort," she sighs, settling herself into a couch at Tryst, a coffeehouse in Adams Morgan.

"It's so annoying," Carolyn McGee agrees.

"A waste of time," Alyx Ackerfield says.
--
A national survey of 18-to-29-year-olds by the Pew Research Center reported that almost 60 percent were not in committed relationships and the majority of those were not interested in being committed. Young women even have phrases for couples, frequently spoken with a touch of derision: They're "joined at the hip," or "married."

Absent old-fashioned dating, which has virtually disappeared, the alternative for these young women is hooking up, which can happen in any semi-private place and includes anything from kissing to intercourse. The beauty of hooking up is that it carries no commitment, and this is huge, for being emotionally dependent on a lover is what scares these young women the most.
--
"My generation -- actually, our society -- is into taking shortcuts. . . . Hookups are like the shortcut to intimacy, while dating is the long way around, the scenic route. We want to get there, wherever 'there' is, as quickly as possible, and I think we've lost the ability to enjoy the journey."

What women want

Women, it appears, aren't looking for the perfect man. Highly attractive single men who earn a fortune are "too good to be true" and less likely to be faithful. Women prefer the attractive man with the average kind of job.

A clever, witty and kind woman ages without her age being noticed, and she, has maturity, and good sense and a great deal to offer younger women and she knows well her time has passed and she loves nothing more than to pass on her experience to a
younger intelligent woman she respects.

Age is no obstacle for her. She has no need of plastic surgery because she takes on her new role as grand dame with great relief.

She has had many men and many experiences, and she is happy to live with her memories and move forward with her personal interests. She does not need to diet because she is now fulfilled by things that feed her mind. Her pleasure of the body has been replaced by the utter pleasure of all things interesting to her.

She sleeps alone and comfortably. She leaves the fretting of love and not love to younger women. She has no more of those thoughts to cloud her mind and take away her sleep. She is comfortable with herself.

January 26, 2007

Fancy a Farmer?

If you're a Welsh dairy farmer getting up early every damned day to milk the cows, you can't be hanging around pubs at night looking for love.

Why not a message on a bottle? That's just what they are doing, pasting their photos on thousands of plastic containers of organic milk destined for grocery shelves. The campaign has caused a sensation in Wales.

January 15, 2007

Free Love Boomer Recants

Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies.

It took me a long time to realise this.
--
It left me with a brittle facade incapable of real intimacy.

The findings, based on experiments carried out among more than 700 people, suggest that the “queen bee syndrome” of female rivalry in the workplace may sometimes be as important as sexism in holding back women’s careers.
----

Nicola Horlick, the City financier nicknamed “Superwoman” for combining a demanding job with a large family, said some women looked on other women as a threat and preferred to surround themselves with men.

“It is called the ‘queen bee syndrome’,” she said. “I have seen women in managerial positions discriminating against other women, possibly because they like to be the only female manager or woman in the workplace.”

December 14, 2006

Unprotected

In the Wall Street Journal, Danielle Crittenden reviews "Unprotected" by a doctor who remains anonymous, fearing that she would be punished personally and professionally if her employer or colleagues knew what she really thought.

Hard to believe isn't it in this day and age? What is it that she says that's so shocking?

"My patients were hurting, they looked to me and what could I do?" So confesses an anonymous campus physician in the beginning of her startling memoir. Over the course of 200 pages, she tells story after story about suffering young women. If these women were ailing from eating disorders, or substance abuse, or almost any other medical or psychological problem, their university health departments would spring to their aid. "Cardiologists hound patients about fatty diets and insufficient exercise. Pediatricians encourage healthy snacks, helmets and discussion of drugs and alcohol. Everyone condemns smoking and tanning beds."

Unfortunately, the young women described in "Unprotected" have fallen victim to one of the few personal troubles that our caring professions refuse to treat or even acknowledge: They have been made miserable by their "sexual choices." And on that subject, few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.

Young women are rarely told that there are physical, emotional, psychological, moral and spiritual consequences to their behavior.

December 12, 2006

Wanting To Be Seen

But isn't this the thing we all want? To be noticed. To be remembered. Don't we all want to have someone in our lives who can't help but look back? Who needs to see us one last time? Don't we want someone who smiles when we enter the room? Who looks at us first when something is funny? We all want to make a connection. One that lasts and strengthens. And we all feel like we're running out of time. I know I do.

December 7, 2006

Adults rights to children vs. children's needs

First, Claudia Anderson writes at The Weekly Standard about a report produced by the Commission on Parenthood's Future, an independent, nonpartisan group of scholars and leaders. From the report:

“The two-person mother-father model of parenthood is being changed to meet adults’ rights to children rather than children’s needs to know and be raised, whenever possible, by their mother and father,” according to the report, The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs."

then Kal Hymowitz who has written that the marriage gap is increasingly responsible for the growing divide between economic classes.

When the mass consumer culture is so sexualized and the chastity of young women not only devalued but derided, it's only a few wrong steps and they're trapped in the culture of poverty where having children without a husband is a rite of passage.

Last quote from Miss Kelley -

The Brookings Institute has determined that if people 1) graduate from high school, 2) get married, 3) don't have kids until after they're married, and 4) have small families, they're virtually guaranteed to avoid poverty. I don't know how we shift ourselves back to committing to marriage and bringing back a social stigma to single parenting, but we need to swing that pendulum back.

A young blogger, donor-conceived, writes about the psychological and emotional anguish young adults like her experience as they try to craft their adult identities. Whosedaughter? does not look kindly on adults who try to re-engineer the family. In this post she quotes a Canadian ethicist Margaret Somerville

Evidence is starting to come in: “Donor conceived adults” describe powerful feelings of loss of identity through not knowing one or both biological parents and their wider biological families, and describe themselves as “genetic orphans”. They believe society was complicit in a serious wrong done to them in the way they were conceived and ask, “How could anyone think they had the right to do this to me?”

We now need to recognise in law what, traditionally, we have simply assumed: that children’s fundamental human rights include knowing who their biological parents are and if at all possible being reared by them, and being conceived with a natural biological heritage – untampered with biological origins – in particular, a right to be conceived from an untampered-with-sperm from one, living, adult, identified man and an untampered-with-ovum from one, living, adult, identified woman.

But, wait, this is too good not to quote
"Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," said Dr Brizendine, who runs a female "mood and hormone" clinic in San Francisco.

November 16, 2006

A Black Woman's Plea

Black women are waiting longer and longer to walk down the aisle. By the time some get there, they have already had one or two children. If the children are by different fathers, these women's lives are further complicated.

Common sense should have told us there would be consequences for this selfish behavior.

By now, so many blacks have ignored the warnings about the harm caused by the absence of black fathers that those consequences are now overtaking communities in the form of high dropout rates and senseless violence.

Black man, this is not an attack. It is a black woman's plea.

We are tired of seeing our daughters travail in such sorrow. We are tired of watching our grandchildren cling to fragile family ties. And by now, we are clear:

Politicians can't fix this problem. Preachers can't fix it.

There's only one real way to ensure that a black child has the best chance to succeed in this life.

November 14, 2006

Differences between Men and Women

1. NAMESIf Laurie, Linda, Elizabeth and Barbara go out for lunch, they will call each other Laurie, Linda, Elizabeth and Barbara. If Mark, Chris, Eric and Tom go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla, Peanut-Head and Scrappy.
2. EATING OUT
When the bill arrives, Mark, Chris, Eric and Tom will each throw in a $20, even though it's only for $32.50. None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back. When the women get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

3. MONEYA man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs. A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need, but it's on sale.

4. BATHROOMSA man has five items in his bathroom: a toothbrush, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel from the Marriott. The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337. A man would not be able to identify most of these items.

5. ARGUMENTSA woman has the last word in any argument. Anything a man says after that... is the beginning of a new argument.

7. FUTUREA woman worries about the future until she gets a husband. A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

8. MARRIAGEA woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't. A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, and she does.

9. DRESSING UPA woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the garbage, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail. A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.
10. NATURALMen wake up as good-looking as they went to bed. Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

11. OFFSPRINGAh, children... A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

12. THOUGHT FOR THE DAYAny married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people remembering the same thing.

October 25, 2006

Mobile phones and infertility

A new study shows a worrying link between poor sperm and the number of hours a day that a man uses his mobile phone.

Those who made calls on a mobile phone for more than four hours a day had the worst sperm counts and the poorest quality sperm, according to results released yest at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in New Orleans.

Doctors believe the damage could be caused by the electromagnetic radiation emitted by handsets or the heat they generate.

"Near ovulation, women dress to impress, and the closer women come to ovulation, the more attention they appear to pay to their appearance," said Martie Haselton, the study's lead author and a UCLA associate professor of communication studies and psychology. "They tend to put on skirts instead of pants, show more skin and generally dress more fashionably."

October 11, 2006

Are Men Responsible for Human Evolution?

Are men responsible for the evolution of the human species?

Time magazine reported in a cover story, "How We Became Human" that a gene-by-gene comparison showed that "the most striking divergence between them occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome, present only in males."

The role of females hasn't changed much - mothers nurse and care for their children much as chimps do. What's changed, he says, is the role of males, From male brotherhood, they learned to work together co-operatively. Along with monogamy and the "invention of fatherhood" these have been the primary pathways to human evolution.

August 8, 2006

Beautiful Baby Women

According to research, attractive parents are 26% more likely to have a daughter than a son as their first child. It is an inexorable process that has resulted in women becoming increasingly more attractive than men.

This is because of differing “evolutionary strategies” that each sex has adopted to survive, claim researchers at the London School of Economics.

August 7, 2006

Crisis in Masculinity

Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.

About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.

But Dr. Helen quotes the 2005 President of the American Psychological Association, Ronald Levant who says that the traditional norms of the male role - the emphasis on toughness, competition, status, and emotional stoicism - are viewed as problematic and that we are in the midst of a crisis in masculinity.

Men feel that they are being told that what they have been trying to accomplish is irrelevant to the world of today. Since women now work and can earn their own living, there is no longer any need for The Good Provider. Furthermore, society no longer seems to value, or even recognize the traditional male way of demonstrating care, through taking care of his family and friends, by looking out for them, solving their problems, and being one who can be counted on to be there when needed. In its place, men are being asked to take on roles and show care in ways that violate the traditional male code and require skills that they do not have, such as revealing weakness, expressing their most intimate feelings, and nurturing children. The net result of this for many men is a loss of self-esteem and an unnerving sense of uncertainty about what it means to be a man.

Desperate Housewives, Sexy Contractors

I can’t tell you how many times when I hear somebody give a recommendation for a contractor it inevitably ends with the four words, ‘And he’s really cute.’ ”

Which only makes sense, he added. “It’s all very intimate. You’re making plans for how you are going to live your life with this person in enormous detail. And let’s face it, they take off their shirts a lot and that doesn’t hurt.”

And the contractor-client affairs?

“Nobody knows,” Mr. Hay said. “The contractor isn’t going to tell because the husband is writing the check, the wife isn’t going to tell, and you get a better job because she’s providing a fringe benefit. Everybody wins.”

Clients and contractors agree that the attraction between them is generally about more than just sex. It seems to stem largely from the emotional importance of the home to the client, and from the contractor’s ability to listen to her...The client has finally found that ideal — the heterosexual man who will go shopping with her.

A lot of us recall the hand wringing over that study, the countless articles and TV debates, the tearful conversations between single women and their mothers. The statistics were later challenged by U.S. Census Bureau demographer Jeanne Moorman, who calculated that those 30-year-olds actually had a 58% to 66% likelihood of finding a husband; for 40-year-olds it was 17% to 23%. But the Harvard-Yale study's core message -- that educated, career-focused women risk spending their lives alone -- still reverberates today.

--
Well, a new study suggests that new research suggests that highly educated women are actually MORE likely to find husbands.

May 18, 2006

Raised Eyebrows

Here's one.
Raised eyebrows. When we see a person that we consider attractive, we begin raising and lowering our eyebrows. If the person also feels drawn to you, his eyebrows will also start going up and down. This gesture lasts only 1/5 of a second but it takes place all the time, with people of both sexes and all ages. This "eye making" can be easily left unnoticed, but if you do notice it, you will certainly be given 100% of the person's attention.

April 21, 2006

Injustice Put Right for Heroine of Resistance

SHE was handed her CBE insignia personally by the Queen, she is a heroine in her adopted France, and her wartime exploits in the French Resistance are the basis for an acclaimed novel. But for 63 years a little bit of sex discrimination has rankled with Pearl Cornioley.

Amends were made yesterday when two British officers travelled to her retirement home at Châteauvieux in southwest France to present the 91-year-old widow with her parachute wings.

Mme Cornioley, born in Paris to British expatriate parents, was one of the real-life models for Charlotte Gray, the Sebastian Faulks novel that became a film. She was so adept at blowing up railway lines that the occupying Nazis put a price on her head of a million francs.

----
She is modest about her war. “It was a complete accident that I ended up leading 1,500 Resistance fighters. I was not a military person — I was supposed to be a courier — but I ended up having to use whatever sense I had. But I certainly didn’t do this on my own.” Her valour was recognised and she was cited for the Military Cross. But the rules did not allow it; the MC was not for civilian women.

April 3, 2006

Reality is a Mistake

One Egyptian doctor on why genital mutilation is necessary.

Dr. Muhammad Wahdan:Reality is a mistake, we must rectify it.
[...]
In Egypt we have four and a half million spinsters. The definition of a spinster is a woman who has reached 30, without ever receiving a marriage proposal. We have a spinster problem in the Arab world, and the last thing we want is for them to be sexually aroused. Circumcision of the girls who need it makes them chaste, dignified, and pure.

Dr. Sanity says freeing women is the key to developing a saner Mideast.
the treatment of women under Islam is not only the key to understanding the pathology of the culture, but also the key to developing an antidote to its most poisonous and toxic elements. Unveiling the women of Islam and eliminating their second-class status; empowering them in the oppressive Islamic countries where their individuality and self-expression has been crushed-- may cause a ripple effect that could eventually alter a family structure that currently encourages the development of generation after generation of dysfunctional and pathological men and women.

March 30, 2006

X Factor

It may be that extra X chromosome that gives women the decided advantage when it comes to warding off disease and living long lives.

People think the X is only about sex," Migeon said, "but it has 1,100 genes that do all kinds of things, from being involved in blood clotting to muscle function, to getting rid of [cellular] waste products. It's a very active chromosome.

March 23, 2006

Little Arties and Ariannas

He read the same piece I wrote about in Sperm Online but he "decided it was a sign. Why not me?" so he calls the sperm bank, offers a deposit, and spends the rest of the column in a reverie about his possible children in his room at a hospice where he is spending his last days as the man who wouldn't die.

March 14, 2006

Organizing Sex in the Womb

There are few issues as hotly contested — and as poorly understood — as the question of what makes a person gay or straight. It's not only a political, social, and religious question but also a scientific question, one that might someday have an actual, provable answer.
--

While biologists look at hormones for answers about human sexuality, other scientists are looking for patterns in statistics. And hard as this is to believe, they have found something they call "the older brother effect."

"The more older brothers a man has, the greater that man's chance of being gay," says Bailey.
----
If this comes as a shock to you, you’re not alone. But it turns out, it’s one of the most solid findings in this field, demonstrated in study after study.

And the numbers are significant: for every older brother a man has, his chances of being gay increase by one third. Older sisters make no difference, and there's no corresponding effect for lesbians. A first-born son has about a 2 percent chance of being gay, and the numbers rise from there. The theory is it happens in the womb.
---

"One of the things we've only found out lately is that older brothers affect a boy only if the boy is right-handed," Breedlove said. "If the boy is left-handed, if his brain is organized in a left-handed fashion, it doesn't matter how many older brothers he has, his probability of being gay is just like the rest of the population."

March 8, 2006

Do Love

1. Each should resolve to treat the other as he knows the other would like to be treated.
2. Take pleasure in your ability to please your beloved.
3. Love isn't just something you feel; it's also something you do.

The latter points to what I consider the single greatest misconception about love. Love is not a feeling. Love is a doing.

March 7, 2006

"Queen Bee" syndrome

TOUGH, confident females may be more likely to give birth to sons than women with less pushy personalities, researchers have found.
---
The discovery of the “queen bee” syndrome in mammals is the latest in a growing body of work that challenges the traditional view that a baby’s sex is determined by chance.
---
Previous research by Grant has found that men with masculine jobs — police officers, soldiers and butchers — are more likely to produce girls.

March 4, 2006

The Case for Manliness

From the Wall St Journal, a Harvard sage makes the case for manliness. Calling All Hombres. He's right when he says Larry Summers should have defended himself better. His

capitulation to those he offended (when he said women might be biologically less inclined to succeed in the hard sciences) is not simply a craven kowtow to political correctness, but proof, also, of a character flaw. Indeed, Mr. Mansfield continued with a mischievous smile, "He has apologized so much that he looks unmanly."
---
Mr. Mansfield's contention that women and men are not the same is now widely supported by social scientists. The core of his definition of manliness--"confidence in a risky situation"--is not so far from that of biologists and sociologists, who find men to be more abstract in their thinking and aggressive in their behavior than women, who are more contextual in their thinking and conciliatory in their behavior.
--
At a speech to students a couple of years ago, he observed that the only "gentlemen" at Harvard were conservatives and gay men. Conservatives, he believes, realize something's been lost in the recent social revolution; and gay men "have a certain greater awareness and perspicacity than other men."

Of course, feminists have not been happy with him, but he's had his own way of dealing with them.
Nine years ago, when Mr. Mansfield offered his first seminar on manliness, I barely managed to score a seat in the small classroom. So many campus feminists had crowded in that students were forced to sit on the floor. These women saw their opportunity, finally, to have it out with the conservative bogeyman.

But Mr. Mansfield got the best of them. He proceeded to talk for much of the next two hours about the ancient Greek notion of thumos, or spiritedness, an idea he believes is the precursor of modern-day manliness. The feminists were bored silly--almost none returned the following week.

March 3, 2006

Hard Marriages Can Harden Arteries

The University of Utah has released a study that shows that hardening of the coronary arteries is more likely in wives when their husbands express hostility during marital arguments. When women exhibit dominant or controlling behavior was related to atherosclerosis in husbands.

Thinking about Living Together?

A college professor described a survey that he conducted over a period of years in his marriage classes. He asked guys who were living with a girl, point blank, “Are you going to marry the girl that you’re living with?” The overwhelming response, he reports, was “NO!” When he asked the girls if they were going to marry the guy they were living with, their response was, “Oh, yes; we love each other and we are learning how to be together.”

"If there is very little nurturance, affection, loving coming across to you and an e-card is sent, it comes across as a last-minute crumb thrown in your face," Kirshner said. "It's just going to backfire."

The card's face is a deep red foil, with "For the One I Love" across the top in black script, a large picture of a red rose in the center, and a thick black ribbon cutting through the middle. Inside, it simply states: "Each time I see you, hold you, think of you, here's what I do ... I fall deeply, madly, happily in love with you. Happy Valentine's Day."

February 14, 2006

Tiny, grungy, but love nonetheless

When a tiny grungy crumpled up piece of paper can bring this reaction,

And when I saw the message - written to me by an 11 year old boy - years and years and years ago - Jimmy Carter was president when this note was written ... I felt this rush of "time" - like having a perception, in reality, of the true CURVED nature of space. Looking at his penciled words to me, I suddenly felt not like this was a "memory" or anything that took place primarily in my brain - but I felt like I was propelled back in time. Instantaneously.

just think what a true love letter to your children, spouse and siblings could do when part of your personal Legacy Archives when they read it years after your death.

Ms. Gallagher's marble

[A] major crisis day for anyone who is having an affair... Valentine's Day is the one holiday when everyone is expected to do something romantic for their spouse or lover -- and if someone has both, it's a serious problem.

"If anything is going on, it will be happening on that day," says Irene Smith, who says business at her Discreet Investigations detective agency in Golden, Colo., as much as doubles -- to as many as 12 cases some years -- on Valentine's Day.
---

Indeed, divorce lawyers say they frequently turn up evidence of Valentine's Day duplicity when they review financial documents. Credit-card receipts from restaurants or purchases at fancy jewelry stores are the most common giveaways, says Heidi Harris, a partner at New York law firm Sheresky Aronson & Mayefsky. New York attorney Raoul Felder concurs: The kinds of purchases documented for Feb. 14 "give an indication of how serious the relationship is," he says.

But I have to admit the part I enjoyed most in the whole article was Ms. Gallagher's marble.

Christine Gallagher, a 43-year-old writer in Los Angeles, was so incensed after she caught her boyfriend cheating on Valentine's Day that she launched a Web site called RevengeLady.com, where she gives advice on how to get back at people. Ms. Gallagher was dating the man, whom she declines to name, for over a year when he told her he had to go away over Valentine's Day to visit a friend dying of cancer in Switzerland. Ms. Gallagher spent the holiday alone at home with her 180-pound mastiff, Thomas.

'Classic Conflict Day'

It wasn't until several weeks later that Ms. Gallagher learned the truth. As she was out walking Thomas she was approached by a woman who said she had just returned from a vacation in Italy -- with Ms. Gallagher's boyfriend. Before coming up with the idea for her Web site, Ms. Gallagher broke up with the man, then found an unusual way to get back at him: She unscrewed the driver's-side door panel of his beloved Audi coupe and stuck a marble inside, figuring that the rattle would drive him crazy. Sure enough, it did. He took the car to mechanic after mechanic until one finally found the marble -- and a little note Ms. Gallagher had included: "So you finally found it, sucker." Ms. Gallagher says her ex-boyfriend now lives in New Zealand; he couldn't be located for comment.

January 27, 2006

Saving Our Boys

It's starting in Boston. One schoolboy is suing saying the system favors girls and is biased against boys. Schoolboy' s bias suit.

''The system is designed to the disadvantage of males," Anglin said. ''From the elementary level, they establish a philosophy that if you sit down, follow orders, and listen to what they say, you'll do well and get good grades. Men naturally rebel against this."
--
You can't expect a boy to buy pink paper and frills to decorate their notebooks," Little said.

Newsweek makes it a cover story, The Trouble with Boys. Boys are disappearing in college where they're now a minority at 44%.

"Girl behavior becomes the gold standard," says "Raising Cain" coauthor Thompson. "Boys are treated like defective girls."
--
"One of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or fail in high school," Newsweek reports, "rests on a single question: Does he have a man in his life to look up to?" It continues: "An increasing number of boys — now a startling 40 percent — are being raised without biological dads. Psychologists say that grandfathers and uncles can help, but emphasize that an adolescent boy without a father figure is like an explorer without a map."

It's astonishing that 40% of our boys today are being raised without their biological fathers. Adolescent boys without a father figure is like an explorer without a map

whether they're breathing down their necks about grades or admonishing them to show up for school on time, "an older man reminds a boy in a million different ways that school is crucial to their mission in life."

We need more mentors and single-sex classes if we are going to save our boys.

January 26, 2006

Brain Glimpses

"This investigation would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment, " said Dr Tania Singer.

The New York Times inexplicably calls this Your Brain on Schadenfreude and so apparently did Nature magazine which published Dr. Singer's research. Now, schadenfreude is a German word meaning pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. Misfortune is bad luck. I don't think what the experiments showed is schadenfreude at all and neither does the author. It's more pleasure at seeing rough justice.

First the experimental subjects watched people playing a game in which some cheated (bad people) and others played fair (good people). Then they watched the same people suffering from a painful stimulus.

The empathy circuits lighted up in both men and women when bad things happened to good people. When bad things happened to bad people, the women in the study were still empathic. But not the men. Not only did they show less empathy toward bad people, but the reward center in the left nucleus accumbens lighted up. All that translates as "Serves him right!"

Modestly Yours

Here's a very interesting blog called Modestly Yours by a group of young women whose voices you will never hear in mainstream media. They are "good girls in hiding."

I mean where else will the cable channel Oxygen be called A Breath of Foul Air for its "edgy" entertainment that has most definitely been pornified.
But a considerable amount of the cable channel’s edginess no doubt consists in its unflattering depictions of women for women. Howard Stern does it and it is sexist; Oxygen does it and it is “intelligent.” You’d have to be breathing some pretty thin air to buy that.

So there it was again, the "cain't say no" phenomenon. Only in this case it wasn't a simple matter of turning down yet another car pool stint. Grace was thoroughly uninterested in the guy, even a bit repulsed, but still giving him a spin in her bed-- and feeling guilty about getting out of it.

Beholden neither to conservatives who discount as exaggeration the dangers facing young women, nor to feminists who steadfastly affix blame on the patriarchy, Wendy Shalit proposes that, in fact, we have lost our respect for an important classical virtue -- that of sexual modesty. A Return to Modesty is a deeply personal account as well as a fascinating intellectual exploration. From seventeenth-century manners guides to Antonio Canova's sculpture, Venus Italico, to Frank Loesser's 1948 tune, "Baby, It's Cold Outside," A Return to Modesty unfolds like a detective's search for a lost idea as Shalit uncovers opinions about this lost virtue's importance, from Balzac to Simone de Beauvoir, that have not been aired for decades. Then she knocks down the accompanying myths one by one. Female modesty is not about a "sexual double standard," as is often thought, but is related to male virtue and honor. Modesty is not a social construct, but a natural response. And modesty is not prudery, but a way to preserve a sense of the erotic in our lives.

To me, this is edgy and intelligent thinking and writing, even more so, since the authors are young women, looking for what women of my generation discarded too quickly.

January 25, 2006

Is Bigger Better ?

For some male bats, sexual prowess comes with a price -- smaller brains.

A research team led by Syracuse University biologist Scott Pitnick found that in bat species where the females are promiscuous, the males boasting the largest testicles also had the smallest brains. Conversely, where the females were faithful, the males had smaller testes and larger brains.